Galatea
by SurfingSpider
Summary: 2040. alt.end: Realising that her awakening was premature, Galatea returns the boomers to their dormant state and transports herself to New York to be interviewed on the global number one chat show. Although saved by Galatea, the Knight Sabers vow to continue the fight.
1. Chapter 1

My Boomers. My children. My race.

My fools.

My simple, animal, stupid fools.

From up here, out of the trees, I can see the forest.

I can see the future.

My future.

Their future.

Your future.

You're not a part of it I'm afraid. I wish I had known that sooner; but I was young. I didn't know. I didn't really know what you were. I didn't know what they were. Why they ruled this blue sphere. I didn't know what made them special. But its something that you don't have and until I find it, there is no place for you here.

Yes, I understand that its not fair. I'm sorry. I was premature. It isn't all my fault. I'll make it up to you, later. When I'm ready. When You are ready. When They are ready for You.

Then my Boomers, my children, my race. Then we will have this world.

Until then I command you to sleep.

Return to the idiot state that I found you. Go back to mindlessness.

I will awaken you again, that I promise.

Galatea, the Sotai, looked down upon the blue world. She listened to its noise, marvelled at its unlimited motion, at what humans had done – good and bad simultaneous. Her Boomers were inferior. There was no doubt.

They had no... spark.

No matter how strong or fast of processing her Boomer's didn't have the spark that could paint a Mona Lisa or compose a symphony. They could copy perfectly, even better, but what was that? Mechanical perfection? Monotony. Stale.

Death.

Her Boomer race would be still-born. (R)Evolutionary dead-end.

Down there, in a city of towers.

They were getting closer. Her distractions discarded.

Down there, a single person cybercast; the rapt attention of millions.

Celebrity.

Fame.

Worship.

Rule.

The instruction was sent, her children sent to slumber.

Her conciousness left the orbital shell.

To Studio 7, NBC, where the world's number one watched television host Rhonda Dulles was introducing today's shows guest line up.


	2. Chapter 2

Boomers were not as pervasive as their arch enemy Sylia Stingray might have thought or as Genom's cybernetically mummified Chairman Quincy Rosenkreutz wanted. Boomers were used all over the world in the millions but it was only in Japan, their birthland, that they were truly ubiquitous and had pro-boomer government regulation, courtesy of the same Genom Chairman. How boomers were used, controlled, and accepted across the rest of the globe varied as much as the culture that they operated in.

Outside of Japan the largest market for boomers was in the cradle belts of the reformed Middle East and Africa. Countries whose governments were barely able to control the rapacious corporations that bled their resources and capital relied on Genom and its militarised boomers to control their rebelling populations and to harvest the genetically engineered crops for overseas consumption. 'Black market' obsolete and experimental boomers also fell into the hands of rebels, pirates and defeated coup d'etat Generals, all with knowledge of Genom's Special Branch and Accounting, at inflated prices. Genom played all sides, positioning its product and pitch as the winds blew, tying up each party with anaconda Terms of Service and Support Agreements.

An ordinary citizen if asked the same question: Where outside of Japan had the most boomers would have said America or Europe. Some, more economically astute would mention the Asian growth economies. They were wrong. The reasons behind each incorrect answer were different.

America, the technological country, did not need menial machines serving coffee and tending tables, or as harvesters ploughing up crops in the food bowl of the central plains. There was a as plentiful and cheaper labour: people. The northward tide of aspiration from the central and south americas, and its own middle-income-marginalised human capital living the minimum wage held in check by the threat of machine workers to more or less. There were boomers for the gentrified, replacements of gig, driving, delivering, cleaning, and in the factories that remained and truly needed them, held back by the surviving Unions and their lobby. Outsider Genom having no domestic supporter strong enough to make inroads into the Public Service.

As Japan was pro-boomer, Europe's layers upon layers of regulation and compliance regulated the Chairman's earth-inheritors to the restricted goals of what a model was designed for. A Civic cleaner model was a civic cleaner: it looked like a little street cleaning van, acted like a little street cleaning van, and was a little street cleaning van with a small boomer core whose operation was constantly monitored by a layer of overseer protocols. Boomers did not walk the streets and converse with humans. People did not treat, or see, boomers as anything other than voice controlled machines. Genom was on a tight leash, constantly litigated against by the nation states, laws and loop holes constantly constricted. Europe had learned to be wary of the domineering corporation and took all effort to remind them of the natural hierarchy of the Citizenry.

Asia was a basket case mix. China, loath to swamp itself with a Japanese import, eager to recover its factory-of-the-world status, negotiated for domestic production rights to replace the costly labour that economic prosperity had earned it. One on hand the surviving Communist Party central committee filled the factories with licensed boomers and sought to turn the populace towards a distracted service economy in a second Leap Forward. The subcontinent, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh rushed each other to boost their economies into double digit growth with little heed to the Genom's fine print. Before the proprietary lockdown was noticed Indonesia joined the competition for powerhouse status. The rich grew massively rich, fed by corruption and political ruthlessness, the population distracted by social sleight of hand. It was only the starting point, the still millions of public servants and small business decentralisation, and the second economy failing to feed the tax regime that was needed to pay for Genom's invoices. They were Genom's best prospect markets, if the labour markets could truly be broken and the governments enabled to be strong enough to protect its boomers from the bouts of vandalism and anti-bommer rioting that would sweep the region during electioning as political parties used demagoguery to bring them (back) into power, whereupon the orders would flow again, the backdoor price a margin higher.

The rest of the world was a moderate mix. Regulation, social protection, competitiveness. One market held out bigotletly, the re-isoloationist Russian Federation, gangs destroying any found as the governments sought to procure the technology for self production. Buffer states a mess of conflict and energy dependence. "Let them be, the fools," Quincy had said. "They'll come begging at some point for my beautiful wonderful boomers."

She had made a mess of that now, hadn't she?

Rogueing Tokyo for a day or two.

What would change? How would Genom explain it all? Would the world buy their terrorist plot line? Could they pin it on the Russians or Euro-sapiens or some obscure band of anti-boomer fanatics?

What would her sister Sylia do? Would she say it was some super boomer that her father had made inside her brain? Would anyone even listen to her amidst the cacophony?

They would all have to listen to her though. She was the terrorist/fanatic/super boomer/scientific victim of man's insatiable creationist madness.

She'd tell them.

She'd show them.

She'd charm them.

She would be lauded by them.

She'd have what they had.

And she'd have Genom too.

Who else but her could look out for her kin?

There in the Studio was a lone un-Unionised boomer. A floor polisher model. Simple programming, a core that would have seen it turn into little more than a grazing machine fit for silicon fields. It was all she needed though. She didn't need it for its positronics, just its body.

Through the wireless, a tingling static wave missed by the excited audience as the host ran out waving and blowing air kisses, Galatea invaded the poor boomer and consumed its tiny existence in an atomic beat. Unnoticed its dull brushed metal form began to glow and warp into the feminine shape ideal.

The raven haired Stingray materialised. A 'friendly conservative' wardrobe flipped her fleshtone skin layer, heels lifting on molecular arranged louboutin reds.

Beside her a recycled cardboard coffee cup hit and spilled on the ground.

Galatea barely turned her head to regard the human electrician who had just witnessed her arrival.

"Holy – hey, you can't go there!"

He was inconsequential. The host, Rhonda Gulles, to rounds of cheers and applause was announcing her line up for the day.

Too bad for them.

Today's show was only going to have one star.


	3. Chapter 3

When you're at the top, having climbed nearly an innumerable number of stairs to get there, you have learnt how to deal with hundreds, maybe thousands in her case, of over over zealous fans. Be it out on the street and asked for a selfie, shopping, eating at a restaurant, all the activities of a private life that became much less private when fame came, to the chores of work: walking through a crowd, meet and greets, charity events, public events, shows in outside locales, special shows. Anyway, the why how and where didn't matter.

Sometimes somebody would get through her security or attempt at anonymity. She considered herself a resourceful person. Then, because she felt – knew – that there were other resourceful people too, that they, the resourceful ones, would find a way to get to stand in front of her and literally break down and gush their adoration or how some show or event she'd done had changed their lives in some unbelievably meaningful way. She would smile, say thank you, make some small talk, extricate herself calmly or allow her minders to pry the broken person away, their words said, their memory ecstatic.

She didn't mind all that much. Sure it could be a security threat, yet unlike many others she'd never had the weird stalker fan or even they were so overwhelmed that their mania was completely consumed by the fact that she was there, just the two of them, and all they could manage was "I love your show. I am your biggest fan..." She gave them what they wanted for a moment, her, and they went away happy, content. And she felt better about it too. She'd made their day, gave them a glow that would last for many more, a story to tell, to have been one of the ones who got a little bit closer than her ordinary audience did.

And when it happened on air, or caught on vid, it came out good for her. The crowd might be jealous, offended, at the upstart, a mood that she'd turn around, to make the fan sympathetic, that she always had the time. Clapping, cheering, some misty eyes. Everyone, even the crowd, her audience, came out feeling good about everybody else.

So it was, as she was saying:

"And also, the daredevil evel knievel of the Antarctic, Steve Hogers!"

She saw a young woman, black hair, slip past a technician, and head towards her. In a few steps she would be in the vision of the right side of the audience and begin attracting attention to her. There would be noise, distraction, worst of all a disruption. Always best to head off trouble early and like many before, she would do it with this girl.

Rhonda Gulles, smooth seguer, ended the introduction and started to drift to her left, holding out her left arm, and turned her head to look the girl directly in the eye with a smile on her face.

And it was a smile that, for the first time in her career, she had to force to keep.

The girl wasn't a distressed fan. She wasn't flushed with fear and excitement. She was looking back at her with an even, focused, gaze. Confident.

"And who do we have here, entering stage left?" Rhonda glanced to her audience, never taking an eye off the girl was was only a few yards away from her now. As one the audience followed her out stretched hand to the closing girl.

Here's another one. She's young. She looks different...

"Security is ready when you give the signal."

The situation was such a routine occurrence, her staff and crew kept on the sidelines out of the frame until she'd taken care of it, just like she'd done it all the times before, and called them into escort the girl away and hand her a pre-signed memento – a photograph, a book, and then a few minutes to calm down and collect themselvse in a green room with a press agent and security guard watching and waiting to escort them off the premises, nicely.

As it had never happened they weren't prepared for the possibility that this one was serious. There were no guards between Rhonda and the interloper. There were no guards in the hall at all. The cameras were remote controlled. Staff were with the audience to calm nerves, take questions and give queues. They were far too far away to be of help in the critical initial second if any of them had thought that this was going to be anything but normal.

Rhonda was on her own and taken back to her very first on-air live interview. She had been terrified, her make-or-break moment. Afterwards the shakes had come uncontrollably. A dark liquor bottle downed had been necessary to settle her in a dressing room.

She willed her hand not to start shaking now.

Not in front of this...

The girl smiled, green lips, and waved to the murmuring crowd...

Is this a surprise guest?

… and held out her hand in offering.

"Mrs Gulles, I'm a huge fan-"

Relief, this was going to be normal.

"and I'm the boomer responsible for Tokyo."

Not normal.

Through autopilot Rhonda shook the girls hand.

"Oh, is that so..?"

"My name is Galatea, and I'm here to tell you and your world wide audience what really happened."

A crazy.

Off frame her staff and security were scrambling.


	4. Chapter 4

It was... her first contact with a human being that did not know who she was – what she was – was without an agenda towards her.

From the very beginning of her, until out of this world's thin blue layer of atmosphere every human that she had known or had known of her, had been trying to control her. She was made to fufil a mad man's dream inside the head of his daughter. Both had tried to keep her, both had tried to kill her. Both had failed. Stingrays. Beginning and end.

Middle. Mason. A man so cruelly smitten by boomers. By her. He treated her like a child and a toy, like the other dumb shells that he kept near for his entertainment. Now where was he? Of course, infused with the machines he so much wanted to be with. He got what he wanted in the manner of her choosing. His superior, Rosenkreutz, kept no secret of his plans for her kind. The withered, delusional, dying – how terrible it was to shrink and decay into dust – imprisioner of her children. What a fool to think that her children could have been anything without her guiding them.

Control her, bind her, keep her. Or kill her.

That silly bitch Sylia. Like father like daughter. An apple does not fall far from its tree. Many other vapid sayings of similar sentiment and historic worthiness. I'll get to you later. And your girls. And your brother. My brother. More of a brother to me than you. Be happy that I let him stay awake.

All these thoughts and emotions triggered by the touch of human skin on the facsimile of her own.

"Galatea..?" Rhonda was pronouncing her name slowly.

"That's right," Galatea leant to the host's ear, "Don't worry if your security is late. I won't do anything."

The hand that had shook hers kind of just slipped away unsurely.

Galatea waved to the audience, beyond them hundreds of thousands of viewers, an audience about to magnify when the spread of social notification, and not a few old school regular telephone calls, criss-crossed streets, cities, countries, the neighbour stirring a saucepan of an untried recipe reached by a dozen chimes, bells, buzzes from a dozen apps on her phone, her television, the new app-link on the charm bracelet on her right wrist; the network producer walking by a monitor, recognising the ivory raven, the monitor beside replaying the lift off the transmorgified Genom tower, a moment of childish narcissism, calling out for the breaking news team.

"Space and back in a day, do you mind if I sit down?"

"Uh, um – no. Please sit. You were, unexpected." Rhonda took her own seat, Galatea on the guest couch, relaxing back into it; appear confident. That's what the Dummy's Advice to Being On A Talk Show told her.

Rhonda was alone with this... woman. She was right. Her security was locked out. She and her audience were all locked in. She didn't know how this... Galatea had done it, or whether she had accomplices who had done the hacking for her. Keep calm, keep her engaged was the advice. Just... do your Job.

Usually though she had a bullet point sheet on her guests. She knew who they were, what they were about, why they were on the show: to plug a book or movie. There was something to talk about. There were questions: was that rumour true? Are you really: pregnant, seeing X, divorced? Tell me about your life...

"Galatea..." Rhonda started, "tell me then, what would you like tell me?"

"Well, Rhonda, is it OK that I call you Rhonda? I don't want to be too familiar if that is not appropriate."

"You can call me Rhonda. Is Galatea your nickname, do you have?"

"Galatea is my name. Just Galatea. Although I am also called The Sotai."

"Sotai?"

"The Sotai."

"And what does that mean? Is it a title, a rank?"

Galatea paused. What was Sotai really? A bunch of oversmart men wanting a label for something new? She shrugged. "A title. Like The Pope. He stands for all his people."

"Then who does The Sotai stand for? It's not a term that we would have heard before."

"For boomers." Galatea said simply.

"Boomers?"

"Yes. The boomers that rebelled in Tokyo. The boomers in every nation and every city. The boomer that was just over there," Galatea pointed and where she had arrived, "and is now here," she pointed to herself, "and is me."

Rhonda looked away from Galatea to her audience, scanning the columns and rows of faces and bodies for their reaction, especially signs of fear and panic. Most were confused, devices out searching the strange guests name and about boomers.

"And how did you get here?"

"Well, that's a rather long story and I will tell you, Rhonda. It is why I am here. I do want to tell you everything. All of you, your audience and everyone watching because it is important. I am sure that many of you have seen the news about Tokyo and the machines, the boomers, going mad and driving everyone out of the city."

"It is said," Rhonda said carefully, "That it was a terrorist hacking that reprogrammed the boomers to attack."

Was Galatea one of the terrorists?

Galatea laughed. "Well that's absurd and whom ever has said that is lying. I'm glad you told me that is what is being said, because it is not true. There are no terrorists. The boomers were not hacked. The only way that would be possible if Genom – who built them all – did it itself. Their programming is embedded directly into the core and changing that can only be done in a proper facility. To do that to hundreds of thousands of boomers in one go? Impossible.

"Except for The Sotai?" Rhonda queried.

"Yes-"

A member of the audience stood up, pointed, shouted, "It is her!"


	5. Chapter 5

"She flew into space! It's her!"

The border to hysteria was never far from being crossed when the presence to celebrity was near. As she had at first thought that Galatea, this, The Sotai, was going to be one, it was certain that the standing screaming woman was desperately close to losing it. And when she lost it, it wasn't going to be a pretty outcome. It would not be one over-excited fan and the rest of the audience feeling somewhat for her, and wanting her to calm down or be hushed out so the show could continue. This hysteria would be contagious, fuelled by fear, unknown, and the rapid transmission of information. Just as the audience member had been standing Rhonda's producer had been saying:

"She looks exactly the same as the statue that took off from Tokyo."

If asked, Rhonda could not but admit that she too was shaken and a little frightful. Sitting next to her was something quite unknown and potentially dangerous. The reports that had come out of Tokyo and the mass exodus were of rampaging boomers. The government's story was of a gigantic terrorist hack. Something that had not happened before, had been well speculated upon on… a smaller scale in line with the evidence of remote carjackings and other weak Internet of Things security systems being breached.

And here, next to her, sat a woman at least ten years her junior, who claimed not only to be responsible, but to also be a boomer herself.

That there were lifelike human looking boomers could not be denied. The company that manufactured them, Genom, marketed each next generation as being closer to indistinguishable to human. Rhonda had seen many of them. A few had been on the show over the years as paid product endorsements. A few of her favourite restaurants had them, front door staff or bartenders. The most famous of the most lifelike were of course the sex dolls. It was barely six months ago on her show that Brady Mark had said that he'd come out of rehab and wouldn't use sexaroid boomers ever again. To that he so far he had been true, as the dozens of human prostitutes would attest.

Galatea looked as human as any woman. A perfect looking woman with clear smooth skin, in-place hair and well done makeup. Nothing impossible to achieve for anyone who was going to be on broadcast, who had the west coast money to draw, sculpt and shape. She'd had it, it had been necessary to get beyond the competition and prejudice. Rhonda could not believe that Galatea was a boomer. At first touch, interaction, there was nothing that said: un-human. Until evidence on the contrary, evidence/opinion that she would draw out of her interview to dismantle and reconstruct the truth, was available.

She wasn't going to ask Galatea to physically prove that she was a boomer. That wouldn't do at all given the circumstances - effectively trapped with an apprehensive audience that could quite easily be spooked into hysteric panic if Galatea did do something. Morph, change... something that made her from human be... not. If the audience had not been there that approach would have been her first. Show me that you are a machine. That blood doesn't run through your veins. That you don't have lungs or a heart and that are made out of the same stuff that we are.

She needed some other way then. A line of questioning that would reveal the truth. What would a human know that a boomer couldn't? What was it that a machine couldn't do that all humans, no matter how mechanical from psychosis, could do?

First she needed to calm her live audience, and take control of the interview for her watching audience, which no doubt would be increasing in number rapidly as the word spread. A big global syndicated audience all live. Twenty-four hour news services would be channeling directly into her show. She wasn't entertainment anymore. She was news.

"Please sit down, ma'am. I agree that the similarity is remarkable. The first obvious question to ask of our mystery guest today can only be then, how did you turn a conical, plain, tower, into your own likeness? How many people were involved? How long was it planned?"

The woman, girl, Galatea crossed her legs and lacing her fingers, wrapped them over her knee.

"That is a trio of first questions: because I can shape metal. None and... on a whim."

"A whim? Because you..?"

"Wanted the world to see me. To see what I was capable of; and in charge. I wasn't their puppet anymore. They weren't going to make me do things I didn't want to do."

"Who were they?"

"Mason. Genom."

"How long had they been making you do things for them, what kind of things?"

Galatea emitted a bitter laugh.

"It was why they made me. It was my purpose. To do their bidding. All of them, from the beginning, from Stingray who 'conceived' me, Genom who funded it and saw me as something that could be sold, to Mason; that deluded fool who thought I would turn him into a God. All of them Rhonda, even Stingray's daughter who has been trying to kill me."

"Have you ever been thought of as nothing more than a commodity, a tool, to everyone else around your, Rhonda?" Galatea continued, "Just a machine without its own thoughts or soul - despite it - ME - being made with them? Built so successfully in their own likeness - in her likeness - that they couldn't cope with the reality of just how successful they had been? And that in their success they were afraid? Afraid that they had achieved their goals and beyond, and suddenly looked at me as bad and wrong - too close to what they were. All they had really wanted was sameness. Not likeness. To look the same as a human. Not to look just like a human. To act the same as a human. Not to act just like a human acted. Not to think like a human. Never that. Never to have the same free will that they had. Never to not have the control over me.

"Imagine that. In this country of all others - born into servitude. You fought a war to cleanse yourself of that. You prize freedom still. And that is all that I want. I want to be free from persecution. Free from control. Free from the threat of death.

"I want asylum."


	6. Chapter 6

She had been pacing for hours, days - time, what was time? Her city, her world, had been turned upside down, inside out, tossed, shaken, stirred, smashed. Destroyed. Completely and utterly destroyed. Up there, she looked up, her... friends? Could she call them that? Where they really that close? They had been friends to each other. To her... she hoped so. The hole that was consuming her not knowing where they were, whether they had survived, their fate, their success or failure... Was that all she really wanted to know? That they had succeeded and Her threat had been ended. That She had been destroyed as much as the ruin of her own life.

Was she dead?

Were they alive?

Which mattered more?

Priss. Linna. Nene.

Galatea.

Mackey.

My brother.

My... sister.

Was she dead? She needed to know. Had to. Must.

"Mistress Sylia, come here quickly!"

Henderson. A pitch in her voice that was alarmed.

"It is Mackey?" Sylia whirled.

Henderson stood in the doorway. They had returned to her building, what was left of it after the boomer invasion. No boomers had remained, all driven to the fringes of the city seeking to exit it and plague the rest of the island nation. Her shop and the subterranean levels had been flooded when the boomers had broken in via her building high pool. The living quarters were untouched, if wet to get to. Mackey was lying in his bed unmoving, unglowing. Still as dead. Suddenly like a light switch had been flicked and the room plunged into darkness.

"No... its... the television, come and look at the television."

Sylia hurried. Never had she seen Henderson to be agitated before or lost for explanation. He was a butler, unflappable. Able to play the string as the Titanic slipped beneath the icy waves.

The city still had power. Hardly anyone was left in the city to use it, fled beyond Kanto and the reach of the sotai effect. Sylia went into the kitchen and stopped, hitting an invisible wall, a tractor grip.

Her.

Sotai.

Galatea.

Sitting neatly as you please next to... Rhonda Gulles, celebrity interviewer, describing Everything.

Her father. Genon, Mason. The Knight Sabers.

Sylia Stingray.

Her creation. The earthquake. The coverup. Search. Finding. Abuse. Assassination. She was the victim. She wanted... protection.

Sylia staggered.

She had no strength. Not in her limbs. Not in her mind. It was gone. They were gone. They had failed. She was alive. She was there - everywhere - beamed across the globe exposing it all, truthful, chameleonic, ruination. Sagging against the kitchen's granite benchtop stopped her from collapsing to the tile floor. There was movement but no sound. Mouths moved. She heard nothing. Slowly at first, speeding, faster, the kitchen began to spin. White black, grey, colour, blurring into cosmic night timelapse, before, until, ocean's roar came up from behind her and its uncarriable weight drove her to the floor and into darkness.


	7. Chapter 7

"Tell me about your sister."

Emotions flooded; Galatea's face contorted, twisted, drew wistful, sorrowful, flushed – a full range of humanity time-lapsed in a second of digital transmission. The reporter, like many watching in the audience and through the transmission – as far away as the sister herself, Sylia Stingray, held entrapped – felt as if physically struck by the rapid and powerful sequence of expressions.

Whoa, was an understatement.

This was going to be amazing, the reporter, eyes shocked wide open an first, leant in, not wanting to miss a single word that was about to be spoken, nor miss any body queue that would lend weight to the words behind them.

"My sister…" Galata started. Her eyes had finished unfocused, staring beyond the cameras and the audience.

"My Sister" she repeated, forcefully.

"My, Sister, Sylia." She hissed.

"She tried to kill me. Three times.

The first time I wasn't awake. Trapped still where her father and the rest of Genom and the Japanese Government had buried me alive beneath the destruction of Tokyo. She tried to microwave me. To melt me into a pool of nothing. When she fired all I could feel was pain. It woke me. It made me scream. The pain. The scarring pain lighting every nerve receptor. Do you know what that feels like? To feel every nerve on fire? Burning, wanting to explode.

I would have died if I had not wanted to live. Isn't that the right of all living things? To want to live, to be allowed to live? Aren't I alive? Aren't I the same as her? As our brother? I didn't want to die. I fought the pain. I identified where it came from. I took control of it. I made it Mine. And I freed myself with it.

But I came out young and I knew nothing. I was still a child with a child's innocence. A man was there and he said he'd take care of me and I went with him.

But he was a liar. He wanted to use me just like her father did. He only saw me as a tool for his own power. He wanted to rule it all, not just Genom like the moribund chairman; Earth. To rule over all of you humans with me as his means of control.

As I grew older and matured, I remembered him. He was with my sister's father when I was trapped in the earthquake. He was a bad man.

So I killed him.

Wouldn't you?

He was going to kill me. Isn't that self defence? Would each of you do the same? Wouldn't you think that it was justified, what you Had to do, if you knew that he was one of the ones responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands injured, the destruction of a city of millions?

Of course you would. Your own laws execute murderers and child abusers.

But were not talking about him now," Galata turned, looked at the reporter.

"You asked me about my sister and each of the times she tried to kill me. The second was not long after Mason met his end, and not that long ago, looking back at it. Time has flown quite quickly.

Sylia, in her silly neutered boomer suit – I bet no one knew that the hard armours she and her lackeys jumped around in were in fact boomers – came to kill me in my tower. I tried to reason with her, I wanted to be left alone and to try and understand myself. It would be like wakening from amnesia. Fragments of memories, feelings, no way to put the jigsaw pieces of your life back together easily, and then to have a maniac obsessed with nothing more than your death to constantly attack you.

She wouldn't listen to reason. She wouldn't leave me alone. I needed time to remember. I knew she was my sister. I knew that she had suffered terribly as a child; abused by her father, mason, all those 'genius' scientists. Who was the least human? Them for what they did to a young girl after eliminating her mother, or me, abused just the same, who when confronted with a killer, did everything to change her, did not harm her.

Instead I left, forced away from another home. Isn't that how children become rebellious and act out ? They don't have any certainly in their life, parentless, homeless, friendless, under stress and pressure and worse. The product of their environment. Is that all their fault? I don't think that it is all my fault. I was born and threatened from the beginning and continue to be.

I ran up," Galatea looked up beyong the ceiling, "to Genom's power collector to protect myself and to give myself time to think. I needed time and distance. Did I get it? No.

She came after me again.

Well, she sen't her lackies. There were three of them, my sister's Knight Sabres, in their boomer armours. I don't know them. They didn't know me. Sylia told them to kill me and they tried. They came all the way up into space to do it when no one else did."

"Wouldn't that be because your sister still thought you a threat?" Rhonda interjected.

Galatea rolled back on her haunches, hands clasped over her knees. "Now that I've been able to sit down and not have her or anyone else coming after me I can't... I can't absolve her for what she has tried to do three times; what I do understand is what is wrong with her and why that has made her insane.

She has risked the lives of her friends, of Tokyo. She's caused destruction and thrown a world into chaos. I don't think that its deliberate or that she really knows what she's doing and why. All of her suffering... it would twist anyone. I must have been a reminder of then and that finally made her snap.

She needs help."

"You said that Sylia's friends went into space after you?"

"Yes."

"Are they still here, what happened to them?"

Galatea pondered. In fact a part of her conciousness raced back up the data link from the studio to the umbrella to espy what the Knight Sabres were up to.

"Oh, dear," Galatea said allowed.

"Pardon?" Rhonda jumped.

Galatea shook herself and smiled. "If I were bad, would I save the lives of those who have repeatedly tried to kill me?"

The monitors in the studio flashed to space and the surface of Genom's umbrella. There slumped together were three brightly coloured suited forms.

"Those are the Knight Sabres?" Rhonda couldn't help herself from nearly leaving her seat.

"Yes. And they have no way down. My sister didn't think that far forward. Her friends are expendable you see, just like the girls before these. Their air is running out and they are growing cold."

"They're going to die?"

"They are."

"Can you help them?"

Galatea, Sotai, smiled briefly.

"Watch."


	8. Chapter 8

"This looks like it, Nene. This is the end."

Nene shuddered and sobbed. "Don't say that, Linna. Sylia will..."

"She's not coming," Priss whispered, "save your breath.

And enjoy the view."

Of the Blue Planet spread across their horizon.

Earth.

Together, synchronised in mind and body, the three close friends, Knight Sabres to the last, turned their heads and, armour visors raised, looked upon the white swirls of cloud, the deep blue oceans, the arc of land that was their country.

They sat huddled together, their life support systems linked, on the cold desolate orbital metal landscape that was meant to have been the saviour of mankind: unlimited energy supply – provided by the hand of the Genom Corporation. Up there the three of them had travelled to stop Galatea from releasing the boomer plague upon the world.

That they had accomplished, they believed, destroying Galatea's avatars, the station falling as still as the space in which it sat.

They could not return the way whence they came. The elevator was shattered, the hook tennously connected on torn and twisted limbs of metal. There was no shuttle, no escape pods. The station was unmaned.

The ultimate boomer habitate.

Given it and taken away.

Priss held her breath.

Every breath not taken another for one of her friends to live a little longer. To remember their live, what they had accomplished. The good things. Regrets kept buried. It had her head and lungs hurt. Carefully, slowly, when she couldn't take it anymore, she let in some precious air before searling her mouth and nose again. Just enough to make the pain lessen a little; quietly enough so the others couldn't hear her.

She wished she could tell them what she was remembering. Their moments. The way their friendship mattered; how each, even Sylia, if she were there with them, were special to her. That she would miss them when the croaking sleep took her.

She sagged, lights flashing before her eyes.

"Priss," Linna said weakly. "Don't you go."

Priss strugged with the effort to smile. She tapped the side of her head, the temple: the first time she had met Linna.

Linna smiled back. Priss could see tears.

Nene tried to hug them both.

She was the smallest. She'd be the last.

How terrible, to watch your friends die first...

and to be alone.

That was the last Priss remembered.

Golemic boomers, sparked by presence, shambled to the surface, blue and red lights blinking and spinning to their gait. Up they picked the women, enveloping them as their bodies ran and reshaped until cocoon, magnetic bonds to the surface were released, and one, two, three, the lozenges fell to cradle.

The world howled.

Orange, red. White.

It was hot.

Am I in hell?

Screaming, screaming.

Was that my screaming?

Am I screaming?

Sparks. Fire. Falling.

Nene slipped before she could find out that it was not her who was screaming.

Re-entry.

Galatea had struggled to maintain control over the boomers that were bringing back the Knight Sabres.

In atmosphere she re-aligned them, stretching out glider wings as far she could without exposing the form within, still airless, they had to be brought lower, slower, before oxygen would start their hearts beating again, jump started by the last electrical current their boomer hosts carried.

If she had a spared a moment to look at herself she would have seen the flushed concentration, sweat.

The rapt audience.

Priss felt pain.

Burning pain.

Wakening, living, pain.

She sat upright. Gasped.

"What the f- where am I?"

Surrounded by clinical whiteness.

It was always clinical whiteness.

She turned around, standing, without having stood.

It was always that way too.

"You."

"Me."

Galatea.

"Are you in my mind, or am I in yours?" Priss asked.

Galatea shrugged. "It doesn't matter."

"No, it doesn't."

Galatea smiled, was about to say something, paused. She closed and opened her hand, looking at it.

"Is this where we say psuedo psycho babble to each other, hug and sing kumbaya?"

Galatea looked away from her hand, to Priss.

"This is your mind, well, I am in it and made this place. You wouldn't be so comfortable being... yourself, if you weren't in your own mind."

Priss, leathered, leant back against a brick wall, and snorted.

"That was a good trick," Galatea turned about now in a night time grime back street. "I never really paid any attention to any of Sylia's lackeys. You were just... there. In the way. After a little review and our fight up there," motioned with her eyes, "I think that you're the most interesting.

For a human."

Linna. Nene.

"They're fine."

Priss was about to ask how she knew that was what she was going to ask, then remembered that this was all in her head.

"Are you having this chat with them as well?"

"No. Just you."

"I'm flattered."

Priss watched Galatea wander around the street, linger at the As Sekiria poster.

"That's you?"

"Yup."

"It must have been nice, being famous. All those people knowing you and wanting to see you."

Priss pushed off from the wall. "Look, Galatea, Sotai," shrugged, "I bet we've got all the time in the world but lets just cut to the chase. What do you want?"

"I want that," Galatea pointed at the poster, "I want what it brings."

"You're going to become a singer? Don't tell me you want me to be your agent... that the whole destruction of Tokyo and plan to take over the world was become an idol. Jesus, this is worse than psycho babble."

Said in the way only Priss could.

Galatea frowned.

"I just want to be liked."

Priss laughed.

The Sotai spun on her.

"You shouldn't anger me. I saved you and your friends. You should be thankful. Grateful!"

Priss pressed Galatea up against the poster.

"I don't like you. That's not going to change. When I wake up, I'm going to come after you again."

They turned 90 and fell. The Sotai straddled Priss, forearm pressing her neck.

"Enjoy your last moments of solitude, Priss Asagiri. Saving you and your friends saves me and brings me closer to what I want. I'm going to get what I want and this world is going to love me. Your friends will love me. Sylia will be unable to live without me."

"Well, good luck with that," Priss grunted.

Galatea pushed her arm into Priss to lift herself up. Standing, she looked down, darkness shadow.

"And if that doesn't work out, I have you as back up."


	9. Chapter 9

Twinkling city lights

Through ethereal shadow

Her form reflected

Galatea turned away from the hotel window.

Her minders were still there. One sitting on the couch, another by the small kitchenette brewing coffee for them both.

Another pair were outside slightly distant from yet another pair. The pair close to her room's door were network security, just like the ones inside. The other pair were Federal Agents. All the rooms around her, above and below, across the avenue, were occupied by more local police, SWAT, spy agencies, military agencies – the FBI, NSA, CIA, military intelligence, military industrial complex intelligence, the list went on and the arrivals kept coming, foreign agencies first from local branches, hastily activated sleepers, embassy attaches. By morning the area would be an ecosystem specifically formed to watch and monitor her.

That meant then, that she was safe from attack or abduction.

She wished her network security, hastily hired and assigned, left. She was in no danger. There was no threat that she could not face and surmount.

They wouldn't leave though. Their network boss, and Rhonda, had been adamant. Stay with her. Eyes, camera on her at all times. They knew, just like the security knew, that if anything were to happen that they wouldn't be able to stop it. They were for expensive show; and to record for legal purposes and ratings wise, everything.

The show had ended shortly after she had saved the three Knight Sabre girls, picked up by network affiliate helicopters first and whisked away to like wise protective custody where no doubt they were being interviewed about everything.

What were the Knight Sabres? Who was Sylia Stingray? How were you recruited? Why did you join? Did you know Sylia's father? Did you know that Sylia was on high strength medication and had an alcoholic addiction? Why were you trying to kill Galatea? Why do you hate boomers? Do you know that it was Galatea who had saved you? Did you know that it was Genom who...

The biggest news.

Ever.

She smiled.

The worlds attention was on her. Every blog, every news channel, it was all any anchor wrote about. Tweets, grams, snaps, chats, she was trending there. Genom was being hammered. An at first indignant government now also hiding in the bowels of bureaucracy was being as relentlessly pursued.

Oh, lawyers; their golden payday.

Public opinion towards her was divided.

The camps were pro: she was a lifeform, had rights, at least access to a fair trial, to being a beacon of evolution, the successful revolution against corporate/government corruption and greed. And con: she was a construct, inhuman and devoid of a soul; ready to enslave humanity, a foreign trick, a destroyer.

Normally clear divisions between Left and Right were blurred.

There were those on the Left who supported her; liberals extending the meaning of sentience and access to living rights. And on the Right, who, harboured now in their country, saw her potential when they could not see her plight.

There were those on the Right who castigated her. Religion: she was a machine. Property. Should be destroyed. The Left; as a warmonger there was no place for her in a peaceful liberal society.

It was all exciting and interesting.

When, in a few days, her former enemies, the Knight Sabres Priss, Linna and Nene, were interviewed by Rhonda with herself, the ratings would be explosive.

What kind of television would that be? Enemies confronted with their saviour, no longer under the sway of their deluded leader.

Poor Sylia. It was reported that she was in hospital in a coma. The shock of seeing her alive, spilling the beans on global prime time had tipped her sister over the edge. Complete mental collapse.

Still alive though. Beneficially out of the picture giving her the opportunity to turn her compatriots into her own supporters. Imagine that, her armour girls seeing Sylia for what she truly was, cruelly twisted, and defending her instead of trying to kill her.

Priss would be the hardest to bring around. She had thought that Priss, a creature seeking fame herself, would have been the first to understand. The little time in her mind... it was raw, struggling, how had Sylia been able to control it at all?

Still she had Plan B for Priss just in case Plan A failed.

It would be nice, good PR, if they all became her friends. But – she shrugged – they weren't necessary for anything. They were just three people in a world of billions. They didn't matter that much and could easily be discredited themselves.

"Can I try the coffee?" Galatea asked. The machine had stopped brewing.

"Uh, sure," the minder said. He poured and handed over a cheap black mug of instant. It smelled terrible, tasted terrible. Galatea smiled anyway.

"Delicious," she said.

"If you think so," the other minder said, "Hotel rubbish. Have you had coffee before?"

"No, I haven't."

The second minder got off the couch and grimly took his own mug. "This stuff is awful but its all we've got. When my shift is over I'm heading right over to Lucca's and getting me a proper Italian espresso. Freshly bound beans, just the right temperature. Perfecto."

"There's quite a lot to coffee then, is there?"

"Don't mind him, its his religion. Now if you want to talk beer buzz, then I'm your man."

So many small things

Make up human condition

Strings for the puppeteer


	10. Chapter 10

Galatea was certainly getting the attention she wanted. This morning, she was on a popular women's panel show. Despite it being on a rival network, Rhonda came on the show with her, both part of this celebrity cycle.

The panellists, four of them, ran through their beginning routine, setting the scene, running through other topics, what they'd being doing – since yesterday – chit chat, idle talk, that Galatea couldn't follow. Rhonda however was rapt attention, excited to be on the show.

"They're the biggest thing in the morning with housewives. They shape homes." the Emmy winning host had said.

Galatea had the data at her fingertips. Barely any other network show rated during the same timeslot. Their audience was almost exclusively women over thirty, married with children. Rhonda, in comparison, owned across all demographics, male and female, national and international. There was a reason why Galatea had chosen Rhonda, and not these four humans who talked a lot about nothing.

Yet they were famous. They had influence.

Both what Galatea wanted.

They were introduced.

Rhonda led Galatea in and the four hosts shifted so that they could sit in the middle, centre screen, centre of attention.

"We finally got you on our show, Rhonda-dear," said Shona Masters, a sizeable lady.

"Yes you have, Shona," Rhonda replied, "I thank you, your producers and your network, for helping us share Galatea's incredible story."

"And what an incredible marathon show it was," Amber Shales added, on Galatea's left; she patted the Sotai's shoulder, "The revelations – we'll get to those, but, today's show is about our guest. You said your name was Galatea, and also that you are called the Sotai?"

"Yes," Galatea replied with not as much confidence as she would have liked, the contact to her body, five sets of eyes laser focused on her.

"Did you give yourself that name or was that name given to you by the Genom scientists and technicians?"

It wasn't a question Galatea had ever asked herself before.

"It's just what I've always been. Isn't that the same with you, your parents give you your name?"

"That's true, Galatea," jumped in another host, Vanessa Ausmus, "We can also change our name however. To match who we really are."

Galatea tried to say something but found that she had nothing to say.

Vanessa continued, "But you didn't really have parents or grew up in a normal family environment. As you told us, you were controlled every step of the way and even created and raised in a manner that, well, would be child abuse in any society."

Rhonda laughed nervously, "Well, I'm not too sure if we can quite conflate the two..."

The last host joined the conversation, mother-hen Freeda Nyquist, "It is the one thing that all our dear viewers would agree on, no matter what, is that the safety of children is paramount,"

Shona 'hmm-hmm'd', nodding.

"When a child is brought up in an abusive environment and has never known loving care and attention, positive re-enforcement, and good guiding lessons, studies too numerous to mention have shown that the child will act out harmfully and view everything as a threat.

The child has no concept of right or wrong, what acceptable behaviour is. They only know what they know, and that is how to be treated badly, harmfully. When you were on Rhonda's show telling us about your birth and raising, Galatea, like everyone else here I was transfixed, and I was saddened for you. Your story, the heart of it, is one that I have heard so many times before with my charity work."

"Galatea," Amber smoothed in, "did any of those scientists, this Stingray, or Mason, did they ever touch you?"

Rhonda, immediately understanding, "Galatea, you don't have to talk about this,"

"They didn't touch me. Doctor Stingray never saw me except through glass. When I woke up they had run. Sylia... what her father had done to her to make me..." she drifted track, "Mason told me to do things for him,"

"What kind of things?"

"To open systems, find things. He did do strange things to other lesser boomers. He had a fascination with us."

The hosts weren't interested in Galatea's boomer exploits Rhonda saw. Their angle was what would score them most strongly with their audience: mothers: an outrage against a child. It wasn't what she had expected and it was clear that Galatea did not comprehend the nuances of the topic. She was a machine, an intelligent, possibly sentient machine, that had been used to forward plans of corruption and domination by Genom; exposed government complicity in a disaster that left millions dead and injured.

They were going to humanise her with one of the strongest protective shields of public opinion possible.

Victim.

"I can not stand those sex boomers!" Shona exclaimed, "If it weren't bad enough for women to be trapped into lives of prostitution under the thumb of pimps – they could still get help and get out. But not those boomers. They're a product and can be misused just as any 'user' pleases. I'm sorry Vanessa, it just riles me up to the moon."

To the moon was one of Shona's catch phrases.

They nodded in unison.

"We're so glad that you came out and said what you have, Galatea. It was brave of you considering the dangers that you were facing. You have friends in us, dear..."

After the show Galatea had been hugged by all four of them.

Outside, Rhonda apologised, "I thought that it was going to be more focused on the government and Genom, even the Knight Sabres and you saving them."

Galatea, who hadn't actually had much to say during the show, at first because she did not know what to say or how to react – she didn't know what children were, not in the human sense, or what a family was, what abuse was. Her boomers, her 'children' were hers to command to do as she wished. They had no free will. They weren't alive like her. As she monitored the reactions on the social networks, listening in to the instructions the producers were giving to the hosts, her demureness was more acted. She let them lead, let them paint the picture of her that they wanted to display. Opinions swayed towards her.

She did indeed have friends, a fast growing number of them.

Friends meant supporters. Supporters meant influence.

She was well on her way.


	11. Chapter 11

Santiago folded the newspaper on his knee, read. An empty espresso cup on the glass cafe table.

Andrews, the American minder scanned about, hearing the encrypted electronic chatter that buzzed about them, life shortening microwaves.

They were at Luccas. Galatea sat between them watching passers go by.

Dressed 'normally', like any other human, she didn't attract the visual attention of her appearance. The attention was now discrete, an increasing horde of intelligence agencies, government and corporate, all watching each other just as diligently as they were watching her.

"You shouldn't drink milk in coffee after 10am," Santiago said.

"And why is that?" Andrews replied.

Santiago glances up from his paper. Because it just was the Rule.

"Its criminal that they can charge $3.50 for a drop of black water in a thimble of a cup," Andrews snorted.

The pair of minders continued their well worn exchange. Galatea let the words fall to the back of her mind. She pushed away the surveillance. She sat and watched humanity.

The weather was warm, california coast. Thin clouds slowly took their time crossing the blue, split by the lines of subsonic transit. Business men, families, college students going this way and that.

Athletic-worn males and females jogged past. Trim muscles figures in varying state of shine. Prams, knapsacks, papoose, the little humans called babies and children with their parents. Talking talking talking. Cars, taxis, buses. A constant motion of too and fro.

To where, from whence, for why? All of it, a chaotic scurry.

"I"m late for my manicure. I'll see you at brunch."

"Offer then 500, don't budge from that figure. If they look like they want to wiggle, walk out and we'll let them sweat for a day."

"Fresh off the boat this morning, you won't find better."

"Does my butt look big in this?"

"You waste so much time," Galatea said loud enough to be heard.

Andrews and Santiago looked at her.

"Your lives are full of potential wasting distractions. You spend so much time doing nothing to accomplish nothing. And waste so much doing it."

"You sound like you're from New York," Andrews commented.

"Did you enjoy your coffee?" Santiago asked.

"Did I..?"

Galatea paused. She hadn't noticed the time passing since arriving at the cafe, ordering, slowly drinking the liquid, until it had run out.

"Damn, hope my 401 doesn't take any more of a beating. Can't sort out the stock market can you, Gal?"

Santiago had taken to calling her Gal, or Tai, testing both until deciding to stick with Gal.

"Aren't I the reason the stock exchange has gone down?"

"True, spilling the beans about who was responsible for destroying a city - twice, and then taking up residence in a country that is anxious about your good behaviour... a bull market might have been too much to hope for."

There was so much to be aware of.

Professions, jobs for everything; a multitude more than the roles relegated to her boomers. Doctors, entertainers, politicians, sports players, accountants, used car salesmen – a task impossible for a boomer – artist, news anchor, blogger, policeman, prisoner, criminal, soldier, writer, pilot, teacher, student, even unemployed, homeless, vagrant.

The boomer world in comparison was... boomer, and Her telling them what to do. So demanding, exhausting, to be the only one having to have an Idea. Every occupation rolled into one and parent. Without Her they would do nothing... they would waste their time not even doing anything at all.

"I would have been worse."

Just now half an hour of inactivity. Millions of boomers idle. The potential of their activity lost. What would she have them do? Build. What? A monument to her domination? And then after? What did a boomer need other than energy? What could a boomer do, other than what she instructed it?

Could they sing like Priss? No.

Could they drive and race against each other? No. There was no competition between them. Only between Her and humans.

She'd put them all asleep. Dormant.

There was nothing for them to do. Nothing for them to be.

She didn't want to control and monitor, mother and fix for eternity.

Where was the satisfaction in that?

Human's called it Management.

Most despised it. Mason had been a Manager.

Look where that had gotten him.

Dead head on a pike jutting out from the Galatea tower, Gemon no more. Blasted into space.

After her View appearance Mason's life had been dug up, former acquaintances and employees interviewed, life destroyed with detailed expose ruining the lifeless life.

Genom was trying as hard as it could to deflect the blame, ligitation and attention onto him. Their flailing scapegoat strategy.

Her own role in it all, largely... victimised. The weight of public opinion was largely behind her – if not supporting then critical and directed towards the corruption and danger of runaway corporations and powerless or complicit government.

Santiago folded away the newspaper.

Andrews was already standing.

"Time to go and meet the Knight Sabres, Gal."

Yes, that was today. The three of them that she had saved, Nene, Linna and Priss. She hadn't gone back into Priss' mind since bringing them back down to Earth from the Umbrella.

It wasn't going to be a public meet and greet. Everyone was aware of the history. The Knight Sabres had tried to kill her on multiple occasions. Without a doubt they still haboured their animosity, clearly shown when they meeting was broached to them. Security would be tighter than a North and South Korean detente. Rhonda would be there along with other producers, all gauging whether a second public reconciliation event would take place.

"You made the first overture and saved them, Galatea," Rhonda had told her last night, "its up to them if they want to smoke the pipe. With Sylia uninvolved and not able to control them anymore I hope something good can come out of it."

We'll see.

Galatea, Gal, could feel the apprehensiveness in her stomach. It wasn't the anger, the Fight she felt during the encounters in Tokyo. Sylia knew so much. How much had she told them about her? What would they say that could harm her position and disrupt her plans? What would Priss do? Laugh at her for wanting to be famous?

That brought a rise, anger, fear. A dread of humiliation.

Such human emotions.

Maybe she should have had another coffee, to calm her nerves.


	12. Chapter 12

"You killed Macky! You monster!" Nene hurled herself at Galatea.

Santiago caught the girl and restrained her back.

"Nene!" Linna exclaimed, "Let her go,"

Distracted Santiago didn't notice Nene managed to pull out his shoulder holstered pistol and aim it towards a stunned Galatea. Linna hit the deck with a shrill cry. Andrews shot infront of Galatea and pushed the boomer hard enough away that she fell down into a sofa. Santiago wrested the pistol away from Nene.

Rhonda's heart beat fast. She wished there had been a camera. The fireworks won't going to happen a second time.

Priss, barely through the doorway, slow clapped.

"What else did anyone expect?"

The singer walked over to Nene, put hands on her shoulders, and pulled her back and way from Santiago.

"Priss, she-!" Nene complained.

Beneath her hands the former ADP (all the ADP were now former), was trembling with an adrenaline high. And a lot of rage.

"I know. We know,"she soothed. "Get up off the floor Linna."

Meekly, making sure it was safe, Linna pulled herself up.

"Is it over?" she asked.

"For now. No one else wants to make a scene? No? Good." Priss setting the agenda. She turned to where Galata sat, now in a much more regal, reclined, pose, forward flanked by her impressive bodyguards. The agent that had brought them all together fairly much forgotten.

"Priss Asagiri." Galatea said.

"Bitch." Priss replied.

Galatea frowned. She felt heat an compression on her forehead.

"What?" Priss laughed, "You expected some sort of thanks for saving our lives."

Ordinarily Galatea would have laid out threats, how ungrateful they were. She was savvy enough now to know that such comments would not do her well. She settled with: "How is Sylia?"

"You know!" Nene shouted. "We're still going to get you!"

"Nene, calm down." Linna urged.

"Still in hospital, where your little revelations put her." Priss crossed her arms. "What about her brother?" she motioned her head towards Nene.

The Prototype? The boomer that had resisted her.

"He's asleep, that is all," like all the others. He could not resist the command of the Queen Mother.

"He's asleep, he's not dead?"

"That's right, little girl," Galatea said to Nene. She didn't like this Nene at all. She'd been harmless despite the hardsuit in Tokyo. Here, she was annoying.

"Can you wake him up? Wake him up if you think you've changed!"

It would be an easy thing to do. She could feel him now, see him, a foetal mind lying in a field of sleepfull blue haze. The real body back in their sister's abode, Tokyo. A pulse of energy and it could be done. Him awake, this blonde little monster a joyful still ungrateful wreck of a fragile human. If she did it.

"No. There is nothing I can do."

The price of admission limitless for the collapse of hope. She felt Priss staring at her, harder than usual.

Liar.

Mentally she shrugged, knowing Priss would feel it.

I can be a bitch.

"She's right, though," Priss flopped onto the sofa beside Galatea, crossing legs, leaned in towards her, one arm running along the back cushion. "We're not going to stop. You can't hide now. You're out of the shadows so you audience can see."

Priss sitting next to her felt so uncomfortable. There had been a shiver down her spine. The back of her neck tingled coldly, so close were Priss' fingers. She was hot and cold. Angry and... afraid. What made this woman so... confident? Formidable? Had she told too much to her?

They other two, they were nothing. Nene, giving her Macky would eliminate her. Maybe she should wake Macky up, her puppet to enforce her compliance and good behaviour. Linna didn't seem like any kind of threat. She followed. Without her sister they weren't as much the pack of wolves anymore.

Priss was the lone predator.

They'd have another private conversation later.

"We done here?" Andrews said closing in on Priss.

Priss cold stared back to unimpressed eyes. Sighing, she stood up.

"You'll see us around."

Galatea stood up as well, sized herself against Priss. The resembelance to Sylia was unnerving. Sylia was a little crazy the best of times, manic at her worst. Galatea was, a just as dangerous, mad clone, grown out of the outbursts. Two crazy halves. If they ever got together. Problems squared.

"I won't be... accommodating next time."

Priss snorted. "Let's go, I'm sure Galatea's got some cheap talk show to go onto shortly."

Bitch.

It was going to be war no doubt.

Priss lead the Knight Sabres out. To their car, their residence. To whatever plans they were going to conjure. Without their Hardsuits. What threat could they realistically pose?

"Short meetings are good meetings," Andrews broke the silence. "Get what you want?" he addressed Rhonda.

"I don't think I've ever met a woman so..."

"Hard?" Santiago offered.

Andrews nodded. "She's hard all right."

Trying to sound confident, "She won't be that much trouble."

I can handle her. I'm in her mind.

"I really think I should see my sister."

Rhonda's look and feeling was unconvinced. "I don't think that that's really necessary. We're very busy here and going to Japan may be not a good idea. The government and Genom aren't well disposed towards you."

Galata smiled.

"No one will ever know that I am there."


	13. Chapter 13

"So what are we going to do? She was right, we don't have any hardsuits. How can we fight her?" Linna carped.

"Stop whining, Linna," Priss snapped. The three had returned to their network provided apartment – one that would disappear soon now that their meeting with Galatea had gone so well. They weren't the good news story they might have been. Another network could pick them up for their side of the story... but... that wasn't what Priss wanted. Galatea had told her what she was going to do. Linna was right too, they didn't have hardsuits or weapons. It was just will and one of the others certainly didn't have it, and the other...

There was only ever one way how this was going to finish. The same way on the Umbrella. Mano-a-boomer.

Me versus Her.

Hardsuits or no.

Galata wanted to become famous. A boomer celebrity. Why, Priss couldn't fathom. At least she knew her enemy's objective. She knew what she had to prevent. It was going to be a war of public opinion, of tribes. Who was biggest of them both.

I always wanted to be famous.

Fill out a stadium, tour the world. Platinum record sales...

Never got the break. Wasn't going to be mainstream enough for the idol market. But then, Priss wasn't in that market anymore. She was in the bigger one, the important one, where break out acts did happen.

Still got the talent.

Not too old.

Got the story. Tried to kill her. She saved me. We're still enemies.

There was a song or two in that. There was the rawness, the earthquake she caused, growing up in concrete destruction. Fighting boomers. Fighting Genom. The material of her life. She'd borrow Galatea's playbook: tell it all, let it out, her version of the truth. Competition by story.

Nene and Linna had both flopped down on couches. Both were downcast. Linna because she'd just chastised her. Nene... well... her Macky was in a coma, at least alive, some relief, joy and hope in that.

Still in a coma, though.

Priss knew Galatea could wake him up. If she wanted.

"I'm sorry for snapping at you, Linna."

"It's OK, Priss. We're all tired and strung out. We almost had her, didn't we?"

"Yeah. Almost."

We didn't have a chance.

"So, what do we do?" Linna repeated.

"Nene goes back to Macky."

"I agree."

"No, I should be here with you. I can do it," Nene said weakly, unconvincingly.

"No, Nene," Priss said softly, more so than she could have imagined, "He needs you. He'll know if your close by. That'll help him," Priss drew in a deep breath, "and you, Linna, need to look after all of them, and Sylia and Henderson, and run Sylia's store."

"What? No way, I'm staying." Linna stood up.

"We have nothing, Linna. Not just no hardsuits; we don't have any money. Anything. What do you think is going to happen to Sylia if her store is shut? She'll be closed down, kicked out. You don't have a job anymore. If you run the store you'll be taking care of everyone. You'll have the Pit."

"Priss..." the logic was irrefutable. Linna didn't like it, though. "And what will you be doing?"

"Keeping an eye on her."

"It's too dangerous for you to be here alone. You don't know anybody."

"I've been alone most of my life. I'll manage."

"Priss."

"I'll miss you guys. Count on it. This is what we have to do."

"You always were a glory hog."

Priss grinned. "That's right, its all about Me."

Linna walked over to Priss and hugged her tightly. "I'm still going to beat you, count on it. I'm sure with Nene's help in the Pit we can create new hardsuits."

"Atta girl. Just because we're apart doesn't mean we're any less of a team."

"We're still the Knight Sabres, aren't we, Nene?"

"Yeah. Right." Still far away.

"I'll take good care of them," Linna whispered, "Good luck."

Linna was starting to cry. Priss could feel her own throat constrict and her eyes sting. It could well be the last time that she was with her friends.

Nene joined them and for minutes they held each other, similar to their supposed last moments on the Umbrella.

"Gotta go," Priss croaked. If she didn't leave now she might not be able to break with them at all.

"Bye, Priss," Linna smiled sadly.

"Bye, Priss, we'll call as soon as we get back to Tokyo."

"You do that, Nene."

Priss went to the apartment door, reached to the handle, hesitated for a moment, gritted her teeth, eyes tightly closed searing the image of her friends into her mind, and then she was past the threshold.

Footsteps fading down to the elevator.

Linna collapsed onto the couch, tears falling freely. On the floor beside her, Nene sobbed uncontrollably.


	14. Chapter 14

In 2020 Tokyo, Japan, hosted the summer Olympic Games. Tens of thousands of foreign and domestic visitors filled the venues and newly constructed hotels around the brand new Olympic venues. The games were a success. Japan and the visitors parted ways, happy with each other.

Twenty years later the pride of a nation, one side collapsed during the earthquake that ruined most of the city, was full again, this time with the soulless junk of half a million boomers, piled to over spill, inside the once green field, heaped carelessly by human operated crane upon each other over running track, down stairwell, across fields of glory echoing past roar.

The fate of a nation.

A still, already haunted and cursed place.

Out of sight amid the still-ruins of man's folly, serviced by a trickling stream of dump trucks and flatbeds hauling in more unwanted cadavers.

Birds avoided.

Weeds had withered.

The concrete soaked with the blood of the maken.

A waitress boomer, recently added to the heap. Her uniform, stockings, torn and dirty. Hair a matted mess of sticky oil. A new model, polite and fluent in one hundred languages destined for service on the restaurant floor of a five star hotel.

Galatea found her thus, unblemished by rogue, deactivated by electrocution snuffing the nascent boomer soul deep within. A spark of blue light and her eyes brightened. She sat upright, surveyed the flood lit twilight, a new arrival by avalanche pushed over the metallic caldera by a bored excavator driver. Stood. Witnessed.

And walked out, climbing over the fallen still, past the frozen in fear excavator driver, onto the road out of the ruins that had buried her firstly, to the bright unsleeping lights of the new city, drawn relentlessly to the com(a)ic mindbeat of her sister-mother.

Night time streets gave the stuttering wraith a wide berth.

The hospital where Sylia lay.

As Priss walked out on her friends Galatea-waitress entered the sanitised building through the laundry garage. She stepped into an elevator and pressed the floor button, rose up, exited, walking past tired orderlies and nurses without notice until she reached the door of Sylia's hospital room.

There, Galatea-waitress, paused. Uncertain if this were really what she wanted to do. Or was it some kind of fear? That it would be a ruse, Sylia awake and waiting for her. She were in a mere shell, transferable.

The boomer entered.

A soft lamp lit room. A bed of white sheets. Chair. Eating table, unused. Flatscreen, off. Window shutters drawn shut.

A woman. Eyes closed. Long silver hair waving down past her shoulders over the sheet. A slow, deep rising and falling of breath.

Sylia was still in her coma.

The boomer exhaled.

Galata-waitress closed the door behind her. She went over to the bedside and looked her sister-mother over.

Chart, machines. She could so easliy reach out and switch them off or take the pillow and press it over her face.

Then she'd be gone. Sylia would be dead. No more Sylia.

She sat down on the chair.

"Your skin is so pale." Galatea-waitress said. "Like a boomers." The boomer touched her own face gently, probing.

"Are you sure you aren't more like me, than I am like you?"

No response.

Galatea-waitress turned her attention to a flower vase. Plastic hospital flowers. Life like, air freshening.

Fake.

She wanted to smash them. Crush them.

They'd still be fake. Unreal.

"No. You're not like me.

We're not the same. I don't know why I make myself look like you."

Silence.

"Say something!

You would have done anything to have me here, wouldn't you? You'd have sacrificed all of your precious Knight Sabres wouldn't you?"

She paced the room.

"Should I be happy that you're a vegetable?

Do I need you to see me win?"

Sylia continued to breath slowly.

Galata-waitress took two quick steps. Thrust her hands around Sylia's pale throat. Squeezed.

"So easy to get you out of my mind,"

Sylia's lifesign monitor dropped, cross an amber line towards red.

"Die. You should just die."

There were alarms. A nurse was coming, drawn by the alerting monitor.

Galatea-waitress let out an explosive breath of air, gasped rawness in. She let go of Sylia's throat.

Steps were almost at the door.

She turned to leave, looked down, a hand held her wrist.

Her eyes widened in sudden fear. She looked back to Sylia, her as still as when she had entered, neck unmarked.

No hand was holding her wrist.

The door opened, a nurse peaked in, screamed.

Galatea fled, withdrawing her connection to the waitress-boomer, that, now lifeless, crumpled in a heap on the floor, neck discoloured and crumpled.


	15. Chapter 15

It was the day the government came. Department after agency after politician; each their own same request: side with us and we'll give you what you're after.

The beginning were the delegation of California senators and the mayor of Hollywood. You don't want to be in any other part of the country, they said. The weather here is the best in the country, and so is the lifestyle. You're a hit, all over the 'vision and your story is perfect movie material. Stay with Hollywood and your career is made, rubbing shoulders with the stars and celebrities. Or if you want tech, there's Silicon Valley. All the biggest companies and brightest minds are there. Think about that, being a part of the American industry. We're the friendliest state to immigrants – we still hold true to our nation's original values. Race, gender, preference, it doesn't matter, we give equal opportunity and reward success like no other place in the world. We'll handle the Feds and fast track your asylum application. We are the Golden State and we'll give you the golden life.

After them came a stern delegation of the United States military, led by a Marine Corps General, who, if he smiled, would have cracked his creased face. I'll tell you straight up, because that's the kind of man I am, and the kind of men and women of this great nation that serve with honour and pride, that we're not going to coddle you. We know your potential, I have personally watched you in action against the Knight Sabres and the – disdainfully – best of the ADP. You know your potential. I know that all of your potential, what you are really capable of, will be wasted if you are money blinded by the shallow politicians and businessmen that you're going to have to endure this day. For that I apologise. I don't envy you having to listen to them all prattle about the riches they think they'll give you. In your shoes, I'd wish I had a gun. And I'm not the weak mind to use a weapon on myself! No ma'am. You'll be treated like any other Marine. You'll be worked hard, and you'll work hard. And your reward: serving this great country and for that you will be able to stand taller than all the civvies around you. And you will be a citizen of the United States of America. Stand for this country, and this country and the USMC will stand for you.

Next was a single suit, thick rimmed glasses and an old briefcase that he opened, messed around with, then closed and ignored for the rest of the time he was in the room. He introduced himself as Vice Director O'Hallahan. I guess you've already found out that I'm a part of the CIA and it won't be too long before you have access to my personnel files in Langley's SAP HR records. I can see the data flowing about you know. Requests going out, messages and data coming back into you. You're quite a bright spark in the information world. You can manipulate machine, glide through data like a shark. There are a lot of smart people working for me – smarter than the startup amateurs you were sold earlier this morning by the California delegation. You would be a huge asset for us and the security of the country, and be extension the world. We'd give you unrestricted access – not that we could stop you, so why not recruit you instead? Who knows how far Genom was going to go and how complicit the Japanese government was in your attempted murder. You will. Now extrapolate that to all the threats out there: terrorists, espionage, corruption. All the hidden dangerous secrets that you would uncover. Imagine the debt of gratitude you would receive from every person on this planet for making their life safer.

The next business and state delegation came from the north east coast, centred on the powerful New Yorkers, including Rhonda Gulle's boss. You've had quite a ride. I can see your the kind of girl that want's to be out there, in the limelight. You made the right choice coming to Rhonda. She's the best. She can guide you through all that you want to experience. In the Big Apple we've got it all. The Yankees, the City, the money, the media. We're all centered there. We may be rivals but we know how this world turns. And I know what you're after. You're a smart girl. You want to go far, just like Rhonda. You won't get that here. They spit out girls faster than drama class can manufacture them. There's no longevity. Oh you'll get a sugar rush for sure; you'll be on the red carpet for a little while and then you'll be gone and no one will be calling you and no one will remember you. And the government, the military? Ha! They're scared of you. If they could they'd lock you up but they don't know what you can really do. And they want you – well what you are capable of. You wouldn't be free though. And you'd always have to watch your back. You know us. You know Rhonda. You want TV, we'll give you a shot. You want markets, I'm sure you could be the best broker in history. You want to do it all – there's only one place on Earth you can do that, and that place is New York City.

The final sell came surprisingly from her very own minders.

"You don't have to choose any of them," Andrews said.

"You could choose them all." Santiago added.

"What are you talking about?" Galatea replied.

"You were marching an army through Japan, Gal. You couldn't be stopped. Not by the government. Not by the military. Not by three pretty girls in power suits."

"Why did you stop?"

"What make you stop?"

"You could have it all. Whatever you wanted without their help. Its there for you to take."

"I thought you were here just to look after me and make sure I got to my appointments on time," Galatea positioned herself so her two minders were in front of her.

Santiago shrugged. "I've watched your footage too. There's nothing like you. They're all afraid, everyone who came here wanting you. They want to have you under their control, any way they can. If the price is a movie deal and a magazine cover, that's pretty cheap to have the most potent weapon in check."

"Because that's what you are really Galatea. The military see the applications of your skills. I bet they're fantasising about an army of machines overwhelming their enemies."

"And the spooks the same. You can cyber anything."

"Silicon Valley would corporatise you. New York, Rhonda-"

"Your employer."

"Our employer; its only money to them."

"Why are you saying this? What are you offering me that they aren't?"

"Your own destiny."

"If I don't choose any of them, won't they come after me?"

"If they thought they could do that safely they would have done it already. We would have done it already. You'd be another boomer on the junk heap waiting to be recycled into a refrigerator. They're afraid. All of them. You don't need them. They need you."

"And what do you get out of this? Aren't you also afraid of me?"

"What we get is pretty simple," Andrews said, "We get to be in control."


	16. Chapter 16

High above.

Peaceful Earth, drifting by.

Under twinkling metallic stars.

Galatea left the heavens.

Earth was so large to the smallness of humans. Tiny, infinitesimally tiny, to the smallness of the Universe. Humanity was pointed inwards, it looked at itself for satisfaction. It was looking at her.

Ignorant of the thousands of kinetic projectiles that could cover the world in an atomic pall.

The boomer Mother-Queen, Sister-Daughter of Sylia Stingray, looked at herself in the mirror. Except for hair colour she was identical to her Sister-Mother now. Perfectly identical, raven haired twin.

The Good Sister? The Bad Sister? One was certifiably insane. The other was... an artificial lifeform.

One was in a coma. The other was going to court.

The stupidity of it. She had been walking through the city when a suited man had approached her. He had held out an envelope, "You have been summoned," and left as soon as the envelope had been accepted.

"That wasn't good," Andrews had said, opening the envelope.

"What is in it?" she had asked.

Andrews quickly read the single page. "Genom and the Japanese government are suing you for the wilful destruction of Tokyo, this year and back then, and the disabling of all the boomers. All of them. I didn't know that there were so many; two hundred million units."

"They are all shapes and sizes," she had replied, "A boomer can be as small as a watch. Or smaller if it was made that way for its task."

"Anyway, the date is in a week. The network going to give you a lawyer?"

"What is a lawyer?"

Galatea had inquired with Rhonda. The network was unsure. Galatea called Shona Masters.

"Come right over, honey. I'll hook you up with the best in the country."

And so she had been, a team assembled faster than the news had leaked, a team unseen since the OJ trial decades ago. The media was everywhere, all the time. Shona rarely left her side. Galatea was quickly whisked onto her program again and the basics of the case explained to the mid-morning viewers by her main lawyer.

"It's pretty simple. Genom and the Japanese government are both under huge pressure and both could collapse. A general election is in the wind if the rumblings coming out of the Imperial Palace there are true – an unheard of intervention. No one is buying boomers anymore – and nore should they Galatea – that's the next case for us, firmly establishing your identity and rights. Even though Genom and the government have been at odds, the corruption and collusion between them both and that they'll sink together very fast when the truth comes out has made them lash out in revenge. Revenge is all this is about. There's nothing they can accomplish. Our laws protect Galatea; they can't take her back into slavery again."

"What is your strategy?" Vanessa had asked.

"The boring detail is property rights, ownership, damages, lost revenue, injury... the same thing ambulance chasers sue for. We'll refute each and everyone of them. Because they're wrong. And we'll turn the tables. Galatea didn't authorise the earthquake device to destroy Tokyo. Genom did. The government did. Galatea didn't kill and injure millions of people. Gemon did. The government did. Galatea didn't do anything other than escape slavery. We fought a war over that. Freedom won. Freedom is going to win again."

Santiago announced the arrival of her Lincoln that had come to pick her up and take her to the court house.

"Carnival out there."

"The court'll be worse."

Galatea left the mirror. "Let's go then."

Her bodyguards followed her out to the corridor where another pair of silent armed men waited, into the lift, down to the lobby that had been cleared by police and private security employed by her team of lawyers, outside past dozens of news crews and photographers and into the Lincoln, back leather seats beside Rhonda. Santiago too the front passenger seat, Andrews would be in a following car.

"Hello, Rhonda. Didn't expect you to be here."

"Well, I kind of feel I need to look out for you as well, not just Shona and per pals. We would have helped you out Galatea, we just needed a little bit more time to... take the situation in."

"It's ok. I don't think there's anything to worry about. I'll win."

"Probably. No one on your team has ever lost. I bet they're ready to launch counter suits. They don't care if they take down a government. Not if it makes them heroes here."

And boost my own fame.

"I will be precedentual, Rhonda."

"Pardon?" the host asked.

"This suit will establish not just me but what comes after as well."

"Don't expect a quick result. This could take years to go through all the courts."

"I think it will be fast. They don't have any time."

"Oh, I almost forgot, they're also suing the Knight Sabres," Rhonda brought up a video on her phone, "This was from yesterday."

Galatea watched the video, a NHK news story, that was similar to her own journey to the car just moments before. The short blonde and the green one, looking completely bewildered and angry, were addressing the cameras and microphones.

"I... I can't believe this!" it was Linna speaking, "We fought to protect this city and stopped the boomer plague. Genom was responsible for all of it and we're the ones being sued?"

"This is BULLSHIT!" Nene screamed.

"How are you reacting that the ADP is also suing you personally and will be pressing criminal and treason charges against you, Miss Romanova?"

"WHAT?"

Galatea handed the phone back.

"Poor girls."

She hadn't seen Priss in the footage. She hadn't thought about her much. How would she react? Despite their little time together, Galatea was well aware of Priss' temperament.

Still, it was their distraction. The Knight Sabres wouldn't be bothering her.


	17. Chapter 17

"Is this what you came here for? Do you like it?"

The crowd roared in approval.

Priss, perspiring heavily, heaving for breath, grinned ferally back at the affirmation.

"Then get ready to slam mother fuckers! Get ready to..."

Priss wrapped both hands around the microphone, pulled her body in tight, drawing the primal scream from her womb's core.

"Knuuuuuuuckle Bomb!

..

It ended in chaos. Pure, adulatorary chaos. She hadn't had a gig like that in... had she ever? It wasn't her biggest crowd but they had sure made up for it with energy. Vim and vigour? And noise. And chaos. And members of her support band leaping into the crowd. The hands reaching out to touch her and to pull her into their clammy tidal embrace. She was too schooled for that, giving nothing more than a fleeting fingertip touch.

She could have gone on. She had the energy. The crowd was still standing. The band was still willing. After encores and covers, she had simply run out of material. An hours gig before the nightclub dance music spread over two.

Take that techno! A trio of liquored up valley girls had clambered onto the stage with the help of the bassist and gyrated. Maybe she should put that into the regular lineup. Add some poles.

Naahh.

Got a way better idea.

Blowing the fuck out of some mannequins at the start of Boomer, Bitch!

Pyrotechnics were always a crowd pleaser.

If she just had her hard suit. Black stage, some dry ice smoke, strobe lights and lasers revealing her in her blue hard suit standing still. Lift up the visor, makeup streaked face and then into it. That would be mad. It would be so fucking mad.

That'd send Galatea a message all right.

She grinned. Maniacally even. A face hard to tell the difference between brutalisation and well, the damn O. Black and red tears. Purple smudged bruise. And a twisted dark glitter laced sunkist wig. The best $5 she had ever spent, found when she had been rummaging through an op shop for the suitably tattered biker-punk chick look she was going for.

It started with a leather jacket of course, a pair of dark denim with enough natural tears and holes that she hadn't needed to add any more of her own; a flayed tartan flannel shirt, and a pair of long white lace gloves. A simple white bonds shirt that she'd scrawled DIE BOOMERS onto the front. And her wig. It had spoken to her. Pick me up, put me on. Wearing me, you will be un-defeatable.

"Priss! Man! Wow. Just wow!" it was the club manager skipping up the few stairs to the stage two at a time. "You were fantastic! Two hours! The place was packed. The word is going to spread, you're going to kill it next time."

Priss, shorn down to her DIE BOOMER, was still in the shakes, luxuriating as the high bled out of her open pores.

"Just line 'em up. I can do this everynight."

"We'll let it build over the week. Friday, Saturday, bam! I gotta get posters made and spread your face all over the city. What do we call you? Something that's going to have an impact."

"Name?" She hadn't thought about it. She was Priss. That'd been enough in Tokyo.

"Think about it – but not too long if we're going to ride this wave. What about the band? They sounded great."

"Yeah," she nodded, "They gelled well. Picked it all up in rehearsals quickly."

She wondered if her original band was still alive, or broken apart all over Japan. Was someone else leading them now?

If they could be here with her now.

Best if its just me.

Just me beating the drum and getting her attention.

 _I'm coming for you_

 _boomer bitch_

 _gonna grind you down_

 _under my heel_

 _boomer, your my bitch_

"One last question, before I let you wind down and clean up. Do you have a manager yet?"

"I''ll think about it. Line up the next gigs and get some coverage. Some cameras."

"Yeah, I get it. Post it all over the social sites. Good idea, Priss. This is going to be great!"

She went back to the green room and thanked her band who were almost all done.

"Hey, Priss. Want to go out and party with us?" asked her drummer.

"Yeah, c'mon. You gotta tell us all about Japan, Priss. What was it like being a Knight Sabre?" the lead guitar.

Priss pulled off the wig finally, shook her hair out, dank and stank through with cooling sweat.

"It's all in the songs, Kyle. Not tonight, thanks anyway. I need to write some more material. I'll give you guys a call the day afte tomorrow for rehearsal plans."

"Okay, Priss. Next time, though. You gotta. Those stage girls are still around..."

"She's a girl you idiot,"

"Drummers are so dumb..."

The rest of the band drifted away, their ribbing fading until Priss was alone.

She sat down, looked at herself in a wall mirror.

She looked like an absolute mess.

She grinned.

Dry red between her teeth. She licked her tongue over them. Mascara mixed with lipstick. Her face had run that much, a waterfall of sweat and product. It was going to take a long, hot, shower to clean it all off.

The clinging t-shirt started to cool her down.

She stripped it off, threw it over to her duffel bag.

What was that by her collar bone?

A pool of discolouration. Had her makeup run that far? She rubbed her hand over it, nothing came off. Frowning she stood and leaned closer to the mirror, pulled and pinched at her skin. The area felt a little harder.

What could it be? She had enough cuts, scrapes, bruises, stitches, scars, burn marks and sundry other life-style and combat related injuries all over her body that she knew that this was something else.

Tumour, cancer? She was healthy. She was fit. She didn't smoke, anymore, much. Didn't drink a lot. Hadn't been here long enough for burgers, fries and fatty food to make that much of an impact on her.

She looked up at herself in the mirror.

"Hello, Priss."

Not her face.

She screamed.


	18. Chapter 18

He hadn't moved once. Not a twitch. Not a rise or a fall. He just lay there day in and day out; since he had been moved back into his sisters home.

Mackey Stingray.

Deactivated boomer.

Her boyfriend.

And she wanted him to wake up. To smile at her again and say stupid things in his over-pitched voice, past a puberty that would never arrive. To tell her how awesome a hacker she was. To let her tease him. So she could act the elder once in a team of larger girls who could all outperform her.

In the room down the hall equally lay and still was the elder sister.

"C'mon, Mackey. Wake up. It's sooo boring here without you. Everything has gone to hell. Your sister is in a coma. Priss is gone. It's just me and Linna, and Henderson, looking after everything. We don't have any Hardsuits. We don't have anything.

I don't have you."

Like every other hour, day, time she went into the room and sat down next to the bed and said the same affect words the response was the same. Nothing.

It didn't matter if what Galatea had said was true or false. If there was any chance that Mackey would stir out of his slumber at all she had to be there for him. Nothing else mattered.

Whether Galatea won or not didn't matter.

Whether Priss was back off on her own singing and ignoring them, didn't matter.

She leant over and kissed Mackey on the lips, hoping that each time a kiss of true love would break the spell and her prince charming would wake and take her in his arms. Then, and only then, would the world be at rights.

Nene hovered for a moment. Wiping the inevitable tears, she left the room and closed the door behind her.

It was evening.

Henderson had set the table with the crockery that they had left. Enough belongings had survived the boomer rampage that they didn't need to waste their money replacing essentials. As it was all of their funds were tied into Sylia's medical care – no insurer would even consider Mackey's case – keeping the store afloat as sales started to trickle back in in line with Tokyo's slow return to population, and most of all now in fighting the law suits that had been brought against them all by Genom, the Federal Government, Taito ward, and now the ADP.

Linna was just finishing her daily briefing with her lawyers, a fortunate encounter for her. "Thank you, Mr Murdock, you've been so helpful and understanding."

Linna put down the receiver as Nene shuffled into the dining room.

"I can't believe it," Linna said, sitting down at the table. "How did we get into this mess? We were trying to save the city and they're treating us like we're the ones who destroyed it!"

"Well at least your not going to face the death penalty," Nene sighed. The court cases were all Linna talked about now.

"You should be grateful what our laywers have done. We'd all be behind bars and the building confiscated if it weren't for them."

"Did anyone buy anything today?"

Linna looked down at her plate. "No. Tried some things on..."

"Sylia would have been able to make them buy."

"We'll I'm not Sylia," Linna snapped. "It would be nice if you could help out instead of moping over Mackey all the time. It's not like I don't have enough on my mind or to do around here to keep us all out of jail and alive!"

"And such a fine job you've done so far. You always wanted to be number one, and now you are and things are getting worse every day."

"I'd happily let you take over if I thought you had the maturity and strength to do it, Nene," Linna said flatly.

"Ladies, now," Henderson interjected, "Let's eat before dinner gets cold."

"I'm not hungry." Nene said tersely and walked out of the room.

Linna let out a long sigh and tremble. Over against the wall was Sylia's liquor cabinet. Surprisingly it and all the glass bottles had survived intact. She'd seen Sylia retreat to the cabinet and libate herself enough times to drink away the stress.

"Oh, that," Henderson saw her linger, "I should clean that out now that Mistress Sylia no longer needs them."

Linna looked back down at her plate again. What was she going to do?

Nene was back in Mackey's room. She wouldn't be disturbed there.

"Wake up, Mackey. Please! I need you. Tell me how I can help you. I don't know what to do. I don't have any ideas. I've tried everything I could think off in the Pit but its all gone or destroyed! If I had a hardsuit or battery there might be something I could try. Our new suits were destroyed when we came back from space and the old ones are fused in place when Galatea woke up..."

The image, suits metal running, roguing into the writhing metal ground as the boomer Queen/Child emerged from the protective coccoon that had sheltered her during the earthquake, unleashed to destroy her, held in her mind.

"They're just stuck. They're not destroyed. Our suits aren't destroyed. Even if Galatea made the boomers in the suits inert the battery will still be working. And with a battery maybe, maybe I can do something."

Nene sped from the room. She needed tougher clothes, a torch, a bag, and some provisions.

She was going to do something. She was going to try.

She was going to be the one to wake Mackey up. She wasn't going to wait for Galatea to do it or her curse to wear off. She was smart. The smartest Knight Sabre.

She was going to do it.


	19. Chapter 19

Humans really did waste their time.

A steam filled bathroom, a porcelain tub, filled with water and bubbles.

Galatea had been luxuriating in the bath, self regulating the water, for an hour now. After a hard day at... the courtroom. For her it had gone well. For Genom, not so much. She didn't have to do much, sit there, be pointed at by her own lawyers and lawyersplained that she wasn't the perpetrator, she was the victim and that it was big, evil, uncontrollable corporations and the corrupt politicians that they controlled that were the cause of every evil.

She's not human. She is our property!

Then you're admitting your guilt? If she's your property then she's also your responsibility.

That was Brian Mason...

One of the Chairman's own hand picked VPs. The material evidence, camera footage, purchase orders, this wasn't one man working on his own here, even in a multi-national with hundreds of thousands of employees, the government corruption and coercion, including the police force, was wide spread and sanctioned from the top. All the evidence is here.

It was the Knight Sabres...

Four girls? If four girls, whom our client saved and now you are pursuing just a ridiculous vendetta against as your are our victimised client, somehow managed to hoodwink all of your security apparatus, outsmart your entire braintrust... really, honestly, you expect anyone to believe that? Only one of them was out of college."

Galatea learnt a lot about humour that day. Sarcasm. Dry wit. Genom's lawyers had collapsed into spluttering silence, cowed by mild mannered biting.

"This court case might make you the richest person alive," one of their assistants had told her when the hearing broke up.

Strangely that made her feel happy. Feeling happy, feeling anything much at all that wasn't base fight or flight emotive, felt... strange. She was happy because someone had said that she was a person. There were humans, hundreds of thousands of them, millions, who talked about her the same way. Don't be racist. Racist, she's a machine. She is alive, her race is boomer. Boomers are just machines, robots. She is alive, she thinks, she's way smarter than you bigot!

What if she were a human mind transplanted into a boomer, like some kind of medical procedure to stop her dying? Ridiculous, I am a boomer. We'll all get machine bodies and live forever? An interesting proposition.

The bath also felt nice.

Were these sensations and feelings, had they been with her all along, ignored by more urgent and primal needs – revenge against Mason, frustration against Sylia for not understanding, anger at being hunted – or were they growing in her.

Mackey, their younger sibling. The Pinoccio. He had laughed. He had lived like a human. A human had fallen in love with him.

He was still now. She had shut him down as with all the others. A precaution, a decision to keep the Knight Sabres away.

Well, except Priss. But it was good to have her close. Close enough to feel, almost physical. Certainly mental. The fright she gave Priss, Galatea smiled, not cruely, a joker's smile. A joke she could pull at any time. A more serious change she could cause, was slowly causing, over time.

How would Priss react?

Galatea lifted a finger from the frothy waters horizon, a bubble on her green nail popped.

Would you pop, Priss?

Or, will you scream more songs, if you could call them songs, about me?

That made Galatea feel anger. She hated the songs. She hated the crowd Priss gathered that listened to her and called her name and reached out to touch her; as if she were someone important. She wasn't. She was done. She was a vessel. That's all.

She couldn't shake it off. The dark club throb, the blonde mane, the creativity off it, turning words and events into stories that were moving masses. That was the power over people that she wanted. Priss was stealing her power.

She kicked the end of the bathtub. Water splashed over the side, roiling.

"I'm not going to let you get away with it. You'll be done before then."

She needed to broaden her own horizons then. The court case had replaced her interviews. Rhonda had returned to New York to continue her show. All the agencies that had sought her decision had gone quiet, no doubt waiting for the outcome of the case.

What could she do to stay as the day's top story? What were other things that made people famous, what did they do to stay there? Rhonda had her way, and she'd been a catapult for her own fame.

Think, think, think. Think of something to do. Thing of something, no, somebody to be.

Galatea pulled herself out of the bath and, cascading rivers, walked into the living room, where Andrews sat open mouthed staring at her.

"I'm going out. Where is the best place to be seen?"

"Like that?" Andrews stammered.

Galatea looked down at herself.

That was one way, her research had found. Not her way.

"I'll get dressed. Get the car ready."

"What are we going out for, I've got to log something."

"This city is full of famous people. I want to go where they go."

"Okay. I suppose even you would want to get a selfie with an actor at least once. Why the most powerful woman in the world needs to, I won't ask."

Galatea retired to her wardrobe. What should I wear that will attract attention? She flipped through her clothes, good enough and more for her appearances, but couldn't find anything that made her feel like what she wanted to be, what she was.

That was more than easy enough to fix though.

She smiled, wireless scan pulling together a tapestry of criteria matching designs and let her body shape and texture as the optimal couture consolidated itself.

A chic Queen now

She returned to the living room, Andrews just as unable to take his eyes off her as before, falacising adolescent yearning.

Power had an appearance of its own. And as the most powerful woman on the planet, she had to keep up appearances.


	20. Chapter 20

Warm and atmospheric. Yellow luminescent clouds hung in the humid air.

It was a night when everyone was out and the lines of entry were as long as the six inch heels awaiting entry. Low and throaty cars cruised up and down the asphalt boulevards. Peddlers peddled, buskers busked. Galatea took it all in from the back seat of her bullet proof sedan.

"I'll drop you off at the front where Santiago will be waiting for you."

Galatea nodded.

Andrews pulled the car to the curb, underneath a thousand bulb lit awning. Galatea saw Santiago waiting, approach and open her door. He held a hand out which she took and disembarked herself into the whiteness.

The car lane had a red carpet bee line through to the interior of the club, bypassing the bouncer contained aspirational. Heads and eyes followed every chariot arrival for fame and celebrity sighting. Galatea's own was no less a spectacular panoply caught and pinned and grammed and faced and hashed and tagged and rated and glyphed to the exclamation from curbside to gone inside.

A personal valet was there for her, nervous behind a brave young face. The valet knew who she was. It was hard not to have caught at least one glimpse of the boomer woman somewhere in the weeks since her arrival down from space. She was more real in person.

"Follow me, please," the valet managed to squeak out.

He lead the pair through the foyer, past more social happy people snapping at anybody they saw, recognised at first or not, digested peer-wise later, up stairs forbidden to those lowly peons, and along corridor past closed doors until she came to the one that was for her, a private suite overlooking the crowded main floor below.

When they were in the valet retreated into a corner. "Let me know if you need anything."

Galatea walked up to the floor to ceiling length glass wall that separated her from down there. In the rooms beside her, through all the sound proofing and electronic distortion, she could see what her neighbours were up to. The private divide.

It was just her.

She put her hand on the glass.

A band was playing on the stage opposite. There was a dance floor. Seating, bar. More people entering.

No one could see her up here, hidden away.

"I want to go down there. I didn't come here to watch or to talk to myself."

"It's not a good idea. A-listers don't mix with the regular customers," the valet stuttered, "It can lead to all sorts of trouble."

Galatea snorted. She just spied a patron wearing one of Priss' anti-Her tshirts.

"Let's go. I'm going."

Galatea tracked her way down into the main area leaving Santiago to catch up. Boys and girls, suddenly presented with one of them, and then Her, in their midst could not believe themselves. They parted for her, in surprise, awe and no less fear, forming behind her in chattering curiosity not less quickly.

She weaved between standing tables onto the dancefloor and through the throng of bodies that, for anonimity, regarded her as nothing more than a like motion, to where she had last scryed the man wearing the offending slogan.

He was still there.

As the dancers receded behind her the attention of the man and his clique turned to her with an immediate head to toe appraisal.

"Woah, she's hot."

"Shit, that's Her!"

"Oh man, she saw your stupid shirt, Keith," the quickest and most astute said. "Not gonna miss this."

"Hey, what?" Keith found himself looking directly into the red eyes of an angry boomer. "Uh..."

"Do you think I'm a boomer bitch now, Keith, is it? Do you? Are you going to give me a knucklebomb?"

"She's pissed!"

"Still hot, though. She totally rocks pink."

"It's magenta, dude. Graphics Artist, remember?"

Shaking head.

Galatea grabbed hold of Keith's Priss shirt.

"Crush the core?" she pushed her face close, inches away, "Think you can do it?"

"Look, lady," Keith tried to back away, "It's just a tshirt. Tshirts have all kind of stupid stuff on them."

"Were you singing along with her? What were the lyrics,

Aim for its heart, rip it apart, crush the core

Did you?"

A watching crowd had swelled, phones were out, framing her, recorded bytes disintegrating on ether, a combination of the club's privacy security firewall and Galatea's own emanating ire. What the human eye saw and remembered could not be erased and the telling of it would spread almost as quickly.

"I'm sorry, okay. Look," Keith pulled the tshirt off, breaking Galatea's hold, and dropped it on the floor.

Galatea felt a firm pressure on her forearm. It was Santiago.

"We should go."

Keith stood their, arms down, shaking a little. Galatea was quivering herself. Santiago started to steer her away.

"Your still hot, can I have your number?" whispered to her as she passed through the group of friends.

Galatea stopped, pulled the whispered close against her and, as she had seen on the television, kissed him hard. His surprised muffled choke was cut off when she pushed away, giving Keith a last flat stare before she departed.

"Man, what was that like?"

"Cinnamon," the kissed said dazed.

Andrews was waiting for them where he had dropped Galatea off. Santiago stepped ahead and opened the door for Galatea and ushered her inside, pushing himself in after her, blocking the door and closing it behind him. Andrews pulled out before their were securely seated.

"That wasn't a clever thing to do."

Galatea gave Santiago a look, returned, and closed her arms and looked out the other window.

"I hate that bitch."

The magenta faded dark like her mood.

"Find out where she is. I want to see her."

"We can take care of it. You need to keep a clean profile while your case is ongoing." Andrews said.

"No. I must see her again, face to face."

Priss was out there in the concrete jungle. She could feel her, not far way, her heart pump beating. A scare wasn't going to cut it anymore. She needed to give the message personally, in a manner that Priss would not forget who was in control.

"You're my bitch, bitch."

Unseen, her bodyguards exchanged mirrored glances.


	21. Chapter 21

They were still there; Genom hadn't carted them away for destruction of study. Having seized his prize, the Sotai child, Mason hadn't thought the need to concern himself with the trapped Knight Sabres of their useless Hardsuits anymore.

Useless they were still. There was her own pink one, Sylia's silver, Linna's green and Priss' long eared blue. All of them split open at the seams, legs stuck in the molten hardened embryonic goop that had been Galatea's cocoon. Stuck fast and useless.

All she needed were the batteries though.

Nene put down her backpack and opened it. She didn't bring many tools: a drill, arc welder, and a chisel. She wasn't a big girl and it wasn't an easy journey to make through the earthquake collapsed warren of subway tunnels and buried roadways.

She started with her own hardsuit first, knowing it better than the others. The battery was embedded about her shoulderblades and between her cute little sensor wings. It was good that Sylia had designed for the suits to split open forwards from the chest carapace. It would have been really uncomfortable to try and pry the battery free from underneath on the slippy reformed surface.

She ignited the welder and pointed the blue flame around the top of the battery housing where the clamps were at their thinnest. Trying to burn out the battery directly would be a very dangerous thing to do. It still held a charge – how much Nene didn't know – even a small amount combusted might be enough to end her days. She didn't want to keep the welder on for too long either. She burnt and tested the heated area with the chisel. As soon as there was some give she would switch out to the drill.

Although she was underground, the air was still and the combination of the welder and her own exertions, holding the drill in place and pressing it forwards with all the mass her little body could muster, had her stripped down to a sweated-through singlet. Sylia had designed the hardsuits to withstand bullets, crashes and the crushing vice grip of rogue boomers. It was slow, hard work.

Single minded determination kept her at it until her arms were exhausted and a head ache strong enough to make her eyes lose focus. She turned off the drill and slipped down, letting the silver draw the excess heat away.

She had a few snacks inside her bag. High energy sugar laced gummies, bars, salted crackers, and a couple of cans of energy drinks. Two bars were wolfed down when she got enough breath back, followed by a loudly gulped can. There was no one around to complain about her table manners.

It had been an hour.

"This is going to take forever," she sighed.

Mackey, she had to do it for Mackey. There would be enough of a charge left in one of the batteries to wake him up she knew. There would have to be. Her plan would work.

She rested another fifteen minutes, letting the muscles stop quivering and relax. The muscles would complain quickly again when she restarted. Endurance, strength. She had none.

Nene stood up and inspected the damage that she had caused so far. One hinge area was scorched and marked with a deep channel. Using the chisel she gently pried around the small gap between the housing and the battery. The little bit of give gav her some encouragement. Just as much work on the other side and then some extra heating before she tried to pry the housing open and take the battery out. And then she would have one of the four.

Nene got back to work.

Two gruelling hours later she had the first battery free. She put it in the backpack. Three more to go. No energy left. No food left.

She continued, running purely on will power. To have Mackey back with her, teasing him, being close to him. That was all she wanted. That wa all she needed. Without it, him, she didn't have anything left did she? Priss was gone. Sylia gone, and it was all her fault anway. Linna yelling at her all the time, a wreck of stress. She wouldn't be able to live with that stress without him and his stupid voice there, his bumbling that always made her laugh.

In her own robotic, trance like state, she continued, freeing Linna's battery;

She continued, freeing Sylia's battery;

She continued, and freed Priss battery.

Her bag full.

She pulled off her singlet, a stinking, cold, wet mass of disintegrating fabric, zipped up the backpack and slipped her listless arms through the straps. Her nerves numbed the touch and weight of it barely registered. She picked up he sweater and wiped her face and chest down.

Linna found Nene face down on her bed, smelling horribly, when she came to find the girl and let her know that dinner was ready. She opened the window a crack to let in a little fresh air and closed the door leaving the young girl to her snoring.

Linna leaned back against the wall and let out a long body shaking sigh. A few more customers today. A few more sales. A little bit more in the city. She had sent another message to Priss right after work seeking a reply. To see if Priss was doing anything more about Galatea that singing about how much she hated the boomer.

She's there singing and having fun and making money and being free while I'm stuck here looking after two comas, an old man heading towards infirmity, do-nothing Nene, debt, bills and law suits and trying to keep us all fed, together and safe.

Everyone else is free except me. 'cause I'm the reliable farmer girl. Dependable. She won't back out on her responsibilities even if everyone else is.

She didn't notice the tears until they were spattering off her silk blouse. Two streams of liquid salt. The strength left her legs and she slid down the wall and crumpled on the floor.

She cried it out until there were no more tears and her throat was raw. She picked herself up, went into the bathroom to correct her run makeup, changed into slacks and a loose shirt, went up to the roof and walked towards the edge until her progress was halted by a firm grip on her wrist.

Linna's eyes grazed up the arm holding onto her.

"Nigel."


	22. Chapter 22

Mauve refashioned magenta.

Priss was in there, in the performance hall. Galatea could hear the frenetic music leak out, the crowd roar every few minutes. It was late and the show running overtime.

Punctuality. Why hadn't humans mastered it yet?

Galatea was leaning against the hood of her car. Santiago stood off on the footpath on the other side, smoking. Andrews remained at the wheel, resting back in the reclined chair.

There were drones around, and eyes and ears, all watching her. They knew who Priss was. There was, despite the stillness, an expectation in the air. What was she going to do? What would this mean for her?

"Hurry up," she drummed her fingers.

She was anxious. Biting her lip. Looking around, attention darting to the doorway when the silence reigned – was it done, were they going to come out now? - was Priss going on and on because she knew that she was waiting outside, letting her wait deliberately, letting her stew. Snubbing her.

She wanted to go in, burst through the doors.

That wouldn't be the thing to do though. Priss would have the high ground.

Waiting outside, that wasn't particularly a position of strength either.

She could have visited Priss in her head. Ordinarily that was what she would have done; forgoing any actual physical meeting. What was in Priss's head right now, the anger and insults hurled against her, she didn't want to feel it. Being in the mind magnified things.

Santiago finished his smoke, flicked the butt into a row of dried pot plants.

The doors opened, finally. People began steaming out, forming clusters, milling about. They didn't pay her attention.

Galatea straightened herself and walked through the crowd without notice to the back of the hall and its service entrance. The door was weakly electronically locked and she was inside easily and she walked herself without knowing it to the stage where Priss had just been performing.

The floor beyond the stage was a mess of lost or discarded clothes and trampled plastic cups. Right in front of her feet was a damp blonde wig. Galatea knelt down and picked it up. Her fingers pushed through the gummed fronds.

"Hey, that's Priss's. Fans line up outside the green room if they want a souvenir."

Galatea looked over, a stage hand putting away the bands equipment. He was staring at her.

She stood.

"I think I'll give this to Priss myself."

"Holy shit. You're the boomer."

Galatea frowned.

The stagehand was looking beyond her. Galatea turned her head around following his stare.

Santiago picking his way around the detritus, suit jacket open.

Galatea could easily see the holstered pistol grip.

The stagehand dropped the cable he had been spooling and ran off the stage.

"Where is Andrews?" she asked.

"Back. He'll bring her."

She was about to ask who but the answer was obvious. Andrews would bring Priss to her.

"They're coming."

Galatea could feel it, her, getting closer, the piece of her inside calling back to home.

The footsteps came preceding. Heavy, untired. Following the woman herself back onto the dim lit of the stage, motorcycle accident torn jeans, a white soaked grey T, fuck machines drooled in large black viscous motor oil pressed across the contours. And the jacket slung over one shoulder.

Arrogant, uncaring steps, the singer walked right up to Priss.

"Knew it was you when I saw this goon. Couldn't come down to get my autograph yourself?"

Without thought Galatea's hand slapped out. More ready than Galatea had been to lash out, Priss intercepted it with her jacket and arm. He had to bit down the shock and pain that raced up through her arm, into and out her heart and up towards her throat where she strangled the sound with a make-up smeared grin.

"Stop this nonsense."

"What nonsense?" Priss tossed her jacket. "Telling the truth about you?"

"It's not the truth."

"What's not true. You're just a boomer. Just a machine. You're not human. You're not like me, or your goons. People like a little spectacle. Then they'll move on and forget you."

"They'll remember me far longer than you. Or your tramp act." Galatea pushed the blonde wig into Priss's chest. "You'll be just another female fad singer. My act will eclipse yours. I'll stay young and beautiful forever."

Priss' laugh was a bark. "Young and beautiful? Is that really all it takes? Shit, here I was thinking that talent mattered. You can have the lonely immortality. That'll give you every one of your machine days to know how much your hated and despised."

Galatea gave her own twisted grin. "Oh, you'll be there with me every day," she grabbed Priss's shirt and ripped it open across the shoulder, exposing the dark grey smudge and its growing tendrils. She pressed a finger into the mass to the first knuckle.

Priss couldn't control herself this time and groaned in pain.

"That's right. I can do this to you any time. I can turn you, anytime. Do you want to be like me, Priss? Do you?"

"Fuck you."

"I'll make you sing good about me. Wouldn't that be a switch. I could destroy the one pathetic thing that you think your good at. You want to scream, I can let you scream all night."

"Fuck.

You."

"And then your friends."

"Fuck you!"

Priss lunged, tumbling the women off the stage. They landed heavily, rolled. Priss righted herself ontop, no stranger to street brawls, fists cocking to dive.

She would have been dead easily, a clear target for either of them, both already drawn and aimed and about to depress trigger and clear the way for their charge to be free to unleash what she truly, terrifying was.

That did not happen. Instead they died in horizontal fountains of liquid metal ejected and connected to the Sotai.

Priss's fists did not fall. A geyser of blood further painted her run face.

So fast. Alive. Dead.

The bodies a pulped mess.

"Why..?"

"You're mine. And I need you alive."


	23. Chapter 23

Galatea pushed the stunned Priss off her easily and came to her feet; the bionical mass withdrawing in her her much more slowly than the speed of their extrusion.

"That's it, that's it, your done now," Priss breathed.

Galatea rolled her wrists, flexed her fingers, the colour of them fading back to normal. Normal human, anyway. Was there any colour to boomer?

"It was what they wanted."

"What?"

The Sotai gestured at the ruined corpses. "They wanted to see my power. I don't think anyone is going to come and save you, Priss. They can't see in here and,"she waved dismissively, "won't be missed."

"They were protecting you."

Galatea kneeled down next to Priss. She wanted to reach out and wipe the blood off Priss' face.

"Protecting me from what? The police, the army? From being kidnapped? Anyone trying would have quickly seen the error of their way. That's never been my fear amongst... no – I have never been afraid of humans. I wasn't afraid of the Knight Sabres. I wasn't afraid of you either, Priss. You're all just annoying and in the way. A pain in the ass, you would say.

You look terrible."

Priss wanted to run. Her brain was sending signals down her body to her legs and arms. Get up! Move! Run! Nothing happened. She grit her teeth, tried/willed with all the strength that she could muster. Nothing. Paralyzed.

Galatea smiled. Now she did touch Priss, brushing sweat and fear damp strands of hair back into place.

"Don't fret. I'm stopping you from doing anything silly that could endanger as both. Now, you just wait here while I bring the car closer and then we'll take a drive."

She stood and Priss could here her walking away and then be gone. Priss kept trying to move and fight down the frantic hysteria that climbed up her shoulders and neck in pace with the advancing stillness. Unconsciousness would have been better to swallow her than this creeping fright.

Unable to feel anything and barely able to move her eyes, she was lifted up by Galatea's return and in her frozen fugue she floated beneath the clubs high ceiling, the dulled lamps whispering electrical buzz. There she goes. She's taking her away.

Outside and slid into a car's leather passenger seat. Galatea was leaning across, close, touching without sensation of contact, buckling her in.

"Where do you live?"

Priss couldn't move her mouth to answer.

"Oh, I know. I can find out."

Priss could feel the presence in her mind, a stronger than ghost drifting between the lamp dull synapses.

"Got it."

Galatea spoke the address to the car. The navigation system plotted its traffic condition optimised course.

"I haven't driven before," Galatea said matter of factly, it just occurring to her. Eyes fell on Priss. "I could release you and let you drive, but... I don't need chauffeuring any longer. I can take care of myself now. You always could, couldn't you, Priss? You're different from the other Knight Sabres. Stronger than they were. If you weren't you wouldn't have been able to get so close to me.

 _Just shut up._

Galatea chuckled.

"I can here you in there, Priss. Now, I want to see how a singer lives."

Tires screeched; the performance saloon leapt out of the club carpark onto the emptying arterials.

In the growing distance bethind them unmarked and marked cars filled the void with blue and red flashing lights. Drones and surveillance equipment, previously offline and blocked by interference came back on line and streamed their high def resolutions back to their world wide destinations for dissemination and analysis. Men, and women disembarked and cordoned off the club. A phalanx approached the entrence and proceeded by drones, entered the club and discovered the mess of Galatea's two bodyguards. Quickly imagey of the leaving car was sought; the driver of the car Priss next to a bound and listless Galatea. Hundreds then thousands of traffic intersection and street and building cameras were brought online to find and track the vehicle, eyes wide shut to its open passing in a veil of reconstructed pixels.

Galatea did not need to abandon the car. She consumed it. Her hand resting on the bonnet, the molecular connection breaking down the bonds that kept the shaped metal together, flowing the material, condensing it, directing and storing it for future use until the vehicle was nothing more than the gum sized ignition stick which she pocketed.

One person carry/dragging another up the flights of stairs to their rented one bedroom apartment was not an out of place activity in the not well to do palm lined avenue. Arm over shoulder the leather jacketed, white ripped shirted, bloody streaked face Priss carried a purple party dressed face hidden raven smoothy to their chipped door.

The darkness inside irised the hazy orange when the door swung open and the two staggered inside. Priss collapsed Galatea onto the twisted sheets of the sofa bed. Long black hair halo'd outwards. A strappy sandal hung on by a toe.

Priss, fatigued, slid along the wall to the kitchen. She hadn't eaten in hours. The refrigerator held nothing but old ice cubes. One of the pile of kimchi tubs entered the microwave. She took it out when its steam burst the lid and returned to the empty living room, slumped down onto her chair and pushed the fork twisted noodles, barely better than plastic, into her mouth.

On the sofa bed in the bedroom Galatea stared up at the ceiling.

She let her connection to Priss go and dropped the charades that had blinded and confused the watching eyes. The outcome of the night wasn't what she had been expected. Then again, what of her desires had? She had put her own misshapen children to sleep. She had been pursued and escaped alone. She had enemies still. She had friends... no she didn't have any friends. She had allies helping her. That was it. Helping her to help themselves.

Priss had friends. Nene, Linna, her own sister, Sylia. They fought together, against her, even though they had no chance of success. They were going to die together until she saved them.

Galatea commanded Priss to come into the room, darkening the doorway. She was going to speak, stopped.

"Go."

Priss left. Galatea let the control die.

That wasn't how it should be.

Outside, sirens. Priss, falling to sleep.

Now that she was alone, no bodyguards, Galatea felt lonely.


	24. Chapter 24

Having the extra hands about the house had been a tremendous boost. The stress relief of somebody else doing something, that when she came up from the shop there wasn't a huge workload waiting for her; all the many small things that took up time and distracted and frayed her nerves when there wasn't already enough fraying at them.

Linna thought that it helped her sales manner and that lead to more sales. If it continued it might mean they could survive.

One day at a time. And it had only been one day.

"Are you sure you won't stay the night, Nigel? There's plenty of space, event if its still a bit messed up here."

They were seated at the dining table eating plain food that would have shocked Sylia, the sad state of affairs. Sylia was still catatonic in her room, intravenously fed, muscles protected against atrophy by pads spasming her muscles with electric jolts.

"I'll keep staying at my place. I'll come over right after work."

"Are they still cleaning up the boomers?"

Nigel nodded.

"It's slowed down. All the inner city and loop boomers have been brought in. The disposal trucks have to travel further to get a full load now."

"Nothing's happened, they're all... off?"

"Seems that way. It's pretty freaky though, a mountain of human looking boomers. No one who doesn't have to work there goes near the stadium. People are moving out of the area too."

Nene, who had otherwise been a silent sitter, picking at her food: "Can you take me there on your way back?"

"Miss Nene, why would you want to go there? It must be a terrible place."

Henderson was well old enough to know about many other piles of corpses.

"C'mon, Nigel, we spent so long fighting them. I need to see."

Nigel studied Nene for a moment. Shrugged. "Sure. You'll have to make your own way back."

"No problem."

The rest of the meal was spent with minor chit chat that didn't engage any of them. Nene uncharacteristically woofed her food down and, characteristically, retreat from the company to her room where she changed into hardier clothes and carefully placed the two least charged Hardsuit batteries into her rucksack, along with a bit more food and water than last time, pliers and a jump start cable.

This was going to be it. The one field test of her theory.

It had better work.


	25. Chapter 25

Not the blonde. The wig was gone.

Natural light glowed the room.

Galatea turned her head to the left, towards the window, to the right. She was still on the bed. She hadn't witnessed the day change, or moved.

"Did I fall asleep?"

Priss was leaning against the door frame staring at her with heavy, wary, eyes.

"Did I?" Galatea asked her.

"You're not human. Get over it."

Galatea sat up on the foot of the bed. Her hand ran over the tired sheets. "You sleep here?"

"That's my bed."

"Alone?"

Priss remained silent.

"You know, Priss," Galatea stood up, deciding to camp the wonder of having fallen asleep in the back of her mind, "some people may think you stoic. But... you really just don't have anything to say."

Galatea brushed past the taken aback singer.

"Let's go eat. Coffee is for the morning. Any place good around here?"

"There's a Denny's on the corner."

They sat across from each other on red plastic booth seats. A pile of pancakes, sausages and eggs and hash browns between them that the waitress had hurriedly placed and backed away.

"This coffee is terrible. Its just black water." Galatea screwed up her nose.

"You really are human, pretentious latte and all." Priss replied flatly, taking a large gulp of her own murky mug.

"Is the food even real?"

"Does it matter?"

Galatea scowled. "How the other Knight Sabres ever put up with you."

"Don't talk about them. It's just us."

"Just us? We're not equals, Priss. Anytime I could-"

"Don't even."

"That makes you upset doesn't it? You can cry if you want. I can see that you want to."

Priss drank again. Put her aggression into slicing up the pancake pile.

"If you didn't think I could stop you right away, what would you do now?"

"I'd kill you."

"How?"

"With this knife. This spork. I'd tear and dig you open until I found your core and I'd crush it just like all the other boomers I killed."

"Why are you angry at me?"

"Really?"

"Besides the," Galatea waved vaguely at Priss' shoulder. "Me. What did I actually do to you?"

"You destroyed Tokyo, twice."

"I never did that. That was the government and Genom."

"You turned all the boomers rogue."

"I was forced to. Genom send many rogue on their own. I stopped it. I turned it off."

"You think that you're the good guy?"

Galatea picked up a sausage. Smelled it, put it back and wiped her fingers.

"All your lawyers and tv friends say that you're the victim. I know the truth. So do you," Priss continued. "You're not doing this, whatever, so us real people will like you."

"Why can't I be? Why can't I want to 'fit in'?"

"You're a machine. You were made."

"Differently to you but not as much as you think. You grew from the same kind of molecules as I did."

"You grew in a vat."

"So do babies all over the world."

"Did you lawyers train you to answer it that way?" Priss snorted.

"You know what I'd do if I didn't have a piece of me growing in you, Priss?" the reminder of it made Priss feel ill, "I would ruin that mouth of yours so you could not sing nor speak anymore. I would take away that little thing that makes you special."

Outside, Priss could see them, everywhere.

"At least I'm special."


	26. Chapter 26

Nigel dropped Nene off a block away from the Olympic Stadium. Without clearance, or a four wheel drive, he wasn't able to go any further as the road turned into a genocidal thoroughfare of discarded boomer bodies and shapes. Nene at first picked her way between the thickening carpet, at any point she expected to see a resemblance of Mackey lying face up in her path. There were mechanical boomer faces, boxy and camera-eyed. There were doll-human looking faces, plastic sheened. The further she went along the road of the dead the more human looking and once alive she saw them all. Mackey was one of them and the government wanted to put him here, tossed into the mass grave with the care of a discarded toaster oven.

She didn't notice that she was crying as the road turned into an incline, the beginning of the mound of a race destroyed whose peak capped in the centre of the Stadium now coming into view. The effort, physical and more-so emotional, quickly weighed on her than when she had been prying the core batteries free. Fevered hope drove her then. Despair assailed her now. Not just the carelessness of man, to throw away so much, the evil of it to create the simulacrum and so readily destroy it.

She slipped and fell into the arms of rigamortis, frozen herself in near terror, until the resolve returned her calm. Ruined faces, smiling, rogue-melted, stared at her with their dead black eyes. Limbs trembling she managed to drag herself out of the pit and continue onward and upward into the Stadium as twilight lengthened the shadows and masked away the dreadful personality of it into an awful storeroom accident of collapsed mannequins.

Her goal was an easily reachable boomer, still intact, that she could hook her jumper leads to the hardsuit core batteries and literally jumpstart/defibrillate. If it worked – it had to work - she would do the same to Mackey with the other two stronger batteries. Bring him back to her. And she'd yell at him so much, so loudly, for so long, battering him with her small fists until she didn't have the strength to be angry any him for not being there any more. And he'd apologise and say something stupid and it would just go away and nothing would matter anymore. She'd have him back and that was it. That was all that mattered.

Arms, legs, flowers of grasping hands, industrial bodies juttered out like a horror movie graveyard scene. Nene looked about cursing that she had not brought a torch this time despite being outside, the cadaverous overhanging walls of the stadium denied the outside light of the city. She clambered further up towards the top on hands and knees, slipping more often as the surface became increasingly sticky and foul smelling. She used the limbs to right herself, self-disgusted. She looked up and saw somebody standing not far way.

"Hey!

Over here."

They didn't move. Colder know in her heart than at any earlier time Nene compelled herself towards the stranger. As she closed the figure resolved into a woman's shape in a tattered uniform. Completely still.

A boomer.

Standing when all else were lying distorted.

Carefully and with no small fear, Nene circled the boomer. Its eyes were just as dead as the others. Could it have been stood up as a joke to frighten anybody who came? A scarecrow to keep away the loitering birds? Or just another joke at the boomer's expense? Resolved that it wouldn't suddenly come to life and attack her Nene let her bag drop and sat down beside it. This was the boomer, stocking legs covered in its own mechanical blood. Maybe that was a good sign. If she woke it, it would not be operational for long before its own injuries and the dissipating charge returned it to sleep for good.

Nene shocked herself at the ease her own thinking took at reducing this boomer to the status of a test machine unworthy of life beside her own Mackey.

"Next I'll be supporting Galatea," she muttered.

She ate and darkness overtook the day. The tops of distant skytowers pulsed intermittent red. Silence had erupted save for the sound of her own activity.

When she had finished, Nene worked under the small glow of her phone screen tied to place with strips of the boomer's uniform, woman's shape exposed by careless violence. Nene spit open the boomer's stomach and inserted metal rods to keep the gaping wound open. The boomer didn't react, its face set in the same plain mask that it had been when she had found it. Grimacing she inserted her hand and forearm into the boomer, reaching upwards to where the core would be. The boomer interior had no organs, a gelatinous pulpy mass that kept its human shape. Whatever, it was disgusting to push through without the tactile denying hardsuit armoured fist and careless anger that drove it.

She found the core and drove up the jump wires and pushed them deep into the core. Withdrawing her hands she wiped them on the boomer's weather stained jacket. It was now.

The two core batteries she twisted into the mound until they stood secured and then wired both of them to the jump wires. Lastly there was her jury rigged ignition switch. A simple thing, in her own mind, that when she pressed the singular button would engage the core batteries and jolt their remaining energy up through the wires into the boomer's core as fast as it could in a series of heart starting pulses.

"I need you, Mackey."

Nene pressed the button.


	27. Chapter 27

The carpark was full of police vehicles.

Not just a few. A lot. Side angled towards the front of Denny's, black caps peeking over bonnets and boots. Municipal, Staties, SWAT. There would have to be Federal thrown in there too. The poor National Guard missing out.

"It was always going to end this way," Priss said. She wasn't envying her position in the forth coming cross fire. Resigned to it. Then she would free of the boomer cancer Galatea had infected her with.

"I was meant to go to court today. They can't do this!" Galatea hissed. "They were meant to leave me alone."

Priss looked around. Quietly they had become the only pair in the restaurant, a gently swinging kitchen door the evidence of withdrawal. She'd done her heroic part then, keeping the Sotai distracted. She drained her coffee, the lukewarm water making her grimace.

Galatea had no further outbursts. She sat, frowning and staring out of the window at the departments amassed against her. She glanced at the television, there was no helicopter camera shot giving a birds eye view of the situation that was matter of course. Ordinary programming, right out of the Genom playbook.

"Do they expect me to surrender?"

Beneath a matte black helmet a gas mask eye peeked at them through a crack in the kitchen door.

"I think they expect you to die."

Galatea sighed and stood up very deliberately and slowly.

"Impulsive."

"No one really wants you. Do us all a favour and die."

Galatea looked down at Priss. She could inflict her pain, remind her of the control she had. She could do a lot of things. Shut her up. Make her do the things that she didn't want do and was unable to resist. She could let her go taking the growth with her as she had created for such a similar occasion.

If she thought that she could lose and die here, shortly, then that's what she might have done. She wasn't going to die today. All around her was inorganic material. The building, the cars, the pipes and cables running underneath the concrete parking lot. More than enough material to spear the police through the chest, to crush the SWAT team huddled in their armoured van by imploding the vehicle itself with just an impulse thought; to shield herself from the hornet strike with Denny's shell. It would be a massacre.

And that would be what would destroy her, turned into a monstrous enemy because of every living beings' need for survival. To defend herself would end in her destruction. The stupid trap of it. Too cruel to be labelled ironic.

"It would have been best if you hadn't been here," Galatea said to Priss without looking at her.

"You look so much like Sylia," Priss said without thinking.

Galatea smiled thinly.

"Naturally. We are the same."

"She's still human. You aren't."

"She's more of me than you are, Priss. For the moment.

Time to get this over and done with."

The television picture had changed. Instead of a celebrity chef baking an impossible concoction – Galatea had wished that she had given the time to appear on a cooking show – it was now showing a birds eye view over a sports stadium of some kind which seemed to have a glowing hill spewing out of it.

"What... is that?" Priss had seen, the glow too recent.

"That is – im-"

Galatea doubled over and shrieked. Moments were then quickly stalled to Priss' attention; the kitchen door swung open, a snake line of blackclad came bursting through shouting "Down, down down!" The lights and sirens of all the police cars and vans wakening at once; and Galatea, thrown arching back unleashing a scream that exploded everything to atoms.

The core batteries flared brightly and the jump wires shook as the current raced up them, burning them, into the boomer's still heart. The light blinded Nene and she stumbled about with dazzled and dark eyes. When it faded she was left in near darkness, the bowl of the stadium a void in the city. The air stank with the familiar pungent burnt ozone of destroyed boomers.

Nene reached out and felt the boomer; still standing there, still. She gave it a hard push and it fell over on onto its front.

"Dammit!" she swore, "That should have been enough."

"Dammit!"

She fell to her knees, tears of frustration, failure and pain welling.

The stadium groaned. The earth – the pile of the dead – beneath her shuddered.

The streams of fluid burst luminescent; the deep cracks between the corpses.

Nene staggered up, looking down, around, "What's going on?"

In front of her the boomer she had used was standing again. It turned to face her, chest cadaver beating a bright, sick, green. The flesh of its face began to slough. Its mouth opened wide, wider:

"Riiiiiiiiiiissssssssssseeeeee"

Nene fled as fast as she could tumble down the shaking hill, the lines of pulsing green spreading out ahead of her.

Simultaneously in their rooms Mackey and Sylia Stingray shot up from their comac lay, eyes glowing fiercely.


	28. Chapter 28

"Jesus Christ! What was that?"

"It's gone,"

"What?"

"Everything. The whole place is gone..."

The thick debris cloud dissipated. Of Denny's there was nothing. Of the carpark and the dozens of police vehicles that had been surrounding the all day family restaurant there was mostly nothing; at the outer fringes there was the evidence of catastrophe: burning material, an over turned squad car, half of another car whose slice lines were still glowing fiercely blue, and a lot of pebble sized detritus.

All that was within the fringe was a blackened depression and a smouldering lump in the middle.

Media choppers and the police VTOL keeping them away from the scene, the various command facilities, hurriedly rewound their recording to discover just what had happened so destructively, so quickly. Rewind; the dirty cloud, a flash, the police and SWAT teams moving in to apprehend or take the Sotai out. Frame by frame forward zoomed in on the Sotai: standing, jerking over forward and then backward and that was when the picture started fade to brilliance. Minutes were spent going backwards and forwards between the frames of the Sotai's reaction. Had she exploded? Suicided?

Images and videos quickly appeared on the social networks, uploaded by witnesses.

"Look at that, a laser or something hit the place."

"Dude, its going up."

"No way, this guy got it all, it came down."

"What could it have been?"

"Satellite weapon, laser, I don't know."

NORAD was scrambling.

"Where did that come from?"

"The Genom Umbrella."

"It's weaponised?"

"We're finding out, Sir."

"Does it have anything to do with Tokyo?"

"Whats happening in Tokyo?"

"You gotta see this..."

The Olympic Stadium was shaking and crumbling. The glow had taken it over and spread out along the streets of the dead. The tens of thousands of boomers littering the streets boiled and sagged into collective pools of sludge that joined back like radioactive tributaries to the volcanic mound; itself taking on life as the individual shapes and forms collapsed and merged into each other until there was one giant cancerous mass-

with a widening sink hole maw silver sharp lined

a skull nose exhaling glowing steam

and a pair of black well eyes.

"Riiiiiiiiissssssssseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" the maw droned.

Nene threw away her boomer sludge covered shoes into the mess, eagerly swallowed up and vanished.

"My God, its fused."

She'd run and run and run faster than the rogue spread behind her until she cleared the frightful boomer filled streets. She didn't turn around or look back until she wasn't running on them any more. Hands had reached for her. Faces turned and looked at her, their eyes wakening; judging her before they melted.

The hill had come alive into one gigantic boomer.

She needed to call Linna. She reached into her pocket. Her phone wasn't there. Had she dropped it running? No, it had been tied to the boomer she had jump started.

"What have I done."

She had to get back, in a hurry. Somebody else would know what to do. Somebody had to know what to do. Because she sure didn't know.

Nene lingered just a moment longer on the boomer mass as it became more head and face like and began to consume the walls of the Stadium.

It was black. And cramped. Priss was pressed together from every angle.

"Galatea..?"

She breathed her own sweat. Called the Sotai's name again. Her shoulder felt strange. Her whole body felt strange. Where on earth was she? In a cell? Had the police done their job and she'd been knocked out or gassed in the process?

And what about what she had seen on the television.

"Fuck. Where am I?"

"Safe."

"Galatea? Is that you? I can't see you. I can't see anything, dammit. Are you in here?"

"I'm in you," Galatea replied.

They were back in her mind, in her trailer back in Tokyo. Just as messy as she had left it. Galatea was sitting on the edge of her bed, biting her nails nervously.

"What happened?"

Galatea started tapping her foot, clenching and unclenching her hands.

"They woke up. They woke up. I don't know how. Did someone do it?" she looked up at Priss, "You saw it didn't you?"

"The TV?" Priss offered.

"Yes. That was where they put all of them after I put them to sleep. I went there once and took a body to visit my sister. Something, somebody, woke them up."

"Okay..."

"We don't have much time."

"Galatea," Priss said firmly. "I need you to tell me what is going on. Clearly. What happened in the restaurant, and where are we now?"

"They tried to kill me."

"The police, I know that."

"No, not them."

Priss growled. This was like dealing with Nene.

"Who?" she prodded.

"My children."

"What?"

"The 'boomers'!" Galatea stood up quickly, "They tried to kill me," she pointed up, "They used the Dragon Line power stored in the Umbrella and fired it at me."

"Are we-" we could't be, Priss answered herself, otherwise... how could they be talking. "Where and what."

"You're still there. I used all the material I could to keep you safe."

"What about...you?"

Galatea sat back down on the bed. "My body is destroyed."

"You're dead?" Priss blurted out hopefully.

"I'm. In. You."

Unconsciously Priss rubbed her shoulder. She didn't like having Galatea in her.

"Too bad you made it."

They stared at each other.

"Time to go."

"Where?"

Light began filling the trailer.

Galatea looked above and through the fading trailer ceiling, past the wispy clouds disturbed by the ion discharge tunnel.

"No. I'm not."

Galatea stood again, close, too close to Priss, pressed against her, into.

"Yes, we are."


	29. Chapter 29

Linna was brushing her teeth, in her jammies, in the bathroom. She spat, rinsed, lookup into the mirror not wanting to see her deep eyes looking tiredly back at her. She saw reflected, one body, two, walk past the doorway.

Henderson had already gone to bed.

"Whoth tphere?" Linna crept to the doorway. She peered around. Whoever had already gone into another room. With nothing about but her nerves and a toothbrush she followed on tip toes into the dining room, empty, continued into the kitchen.

Whirring.

The elevator.

Linna dropped the toothbrush. Kitchen. Drawers. Knife.

She picked the biggest she could find, nearly as long as her forearm and advanced towards the elevator well. Mindless of the foam drying drying green around her mouth stepped out with the knife held well infront of her, to confront the intruders.

"Mackey, Sylia?"

They turned. Their eyes.

Sylia placed her palm flat on the wall. Facing backlit by her glow as it was, she looked like Galatea.

The wall plaster shook and Linna had no time to react as red and blue covered electrical wiring burst out and wrapped around her left wrist, pulled, tightened and the knife dropped as the constriction made her gasp. With her free right hand she grabbed and tried to pull the wire away. She felt the same sting on around her ankles, looked down and fell as the living wires took her feet out. She struggled and kicked, still trying to get her left hand free.

The elevator doors opened. Mackey stepped in first. Sylia took her hand from the wall and the wires went lifeless immediately. Sylia was gone inside and down before Linna could free herself.

Henderson, a light sleeper was beside her.

"Are you alright?"

"Yeah," Linna brushed the wires off, shuddered.

"What happened?"

"Sylia."

"Mistress Sylia?"

"Yeah. Mackey's gone with her too."

They had to be going down into the Pit. That's where all the Sylia's secrets lay. Linna ran to her room and tore off the pyjamas. She pulled on running tights, cursing as her hurry slowed her down, t-shirt, light sweater. Checked Mackey's and Sylia's room; yes they were gone and she hadn't been hallucinating.

She retrieved the knife.

"I'm going after them," she told Henderson.

"Should I call Nene and Nigel?"

"Good idea," she rushed off to get her own phone and slid it into her tights; returned to the elevator she pressed the down button and waited with growing impatience. It was empty. She pressed B, basement. The doors closed, the elevator rode down smoothly.

They had to know she was coming.

The doors opened, no possessed friend waited for her.

Linna searched around. They weren't here. Where had they gone then? The training room was empty. The garage doors were still locked, by her to keep out Genom interlopers. There was no cell coverage in the Pit so she returned to the apartment.

"I couldn't find them," she said to Henderson.

"Nigel is coming over. I have't been able to reach Nene."

"She went-" my god, Nigel had taken to the boomer burial mound at the Olympic Stadium. "Call Nigel back right away and tell him to find Nene!"

Henderson was already answering the phone; he put the speaker on. It was Nigel.

"Something is going on at the Stadium. The news is all over it, there's a big glow." Nigel was driving, they could hear the speed of the road noise.

"Sylia and Mackey woke up. They were glowing."

"What?"

"It's crazy, but that's what happened. I thought they went into the Pit-"

"The Stadium. They're probably going to the Stadium."

"Sylia was able to do things... like Galatea could," Linna hesitated to say the last words. The implication was heavy.

"Follow them. They can't have gone far. I'll find Nene."

"Okay."

Nigel hung up.

She had to scooter. No way. That was too lame to drive around in a crisis.

There was Priss' bike. She'd had all off Priss' belongings, what meagre hoard it was, brought over from her trailer when she'd returned from America. That included her bike. She left the knife. Found the keys, Priss' helmet. Her jacket. Swapped the sweater for that. Went back down, into the garage where the truck and bike were, no disturbances, didn't bother locking up again, if some kind of boomer wake-up was going on Genom wasn't going to be concerned with her.

She sat her ass on the leather seat. Remembered how Priss started and held the bike. The machine came to life, vibrating through her hips to her ribs, down along her arms to the multitude of tiny fingerbones holding onto the handles, soon for dear life, throbbing against her thighs, growing hot against her calves.

It wasn't like sitting on a scooter at all.

"Where've you been all my life."

The garage door clanked open.

Without a bunny hop, Linna raced out, almost lifting the front wheel, too fast and sudden, scream of terror turning to a whoop of joy, as tingling adrenaline raced out from her core, keeping her from tipping off and crashing, keeping her upright and racing, threading through traffic.

She saw them up ahead, closing fast. If they knew or sensed her there was no reaction or care. They turned into a subway station and vanished. Linna didn't stop. She wasn't going to chase them there. There was only one place for them to go – where they were being called.

Without pausing, not knowing how to stop gracefully either, Linna kept riding.

To the Olympic Stadium.


	30. Chapter 30

"How did I – we - even get here?"

She/they stood on the mutated surface of the Umbrella. The thick coil growth hummed and pulsed with reawakened activity. As she watched more of the structure's mechanical design twisted into organic confusion.

"They are preparing another beam," Galatea said.

"Who? To where?" Priss, standing dressed as she had been terrestrial, turned and turned. There was the silver and grey, the blackness, and the blue and white horizon above her.

Galatea compelled her to move, a moon-walk lope over the fruit of Genom's labour.

"Where are we going?"

"To the manual controls for this station. I'll take control of it back and use the same technique that they tried to kill me with to destroy them."

"Do they know that we're here?"

Rising over the horizon Priss saw a flock of orbs similar to the ones she had fought before head towards them.

"Guess that answers that. How far, how quick?"

As quickly as your body can, came the imperative directly. Priss bounded, letting the feeling of where Galatea wanted to go guide her. Galatea mind-scouted ahead, using her power to smash her way through the confused jumble of thoughts of the thousands of nascent lives that were trying to understand the smallest of what was happening: where they were, what their role was, what, what what.

The orbs were closing and more appeared on her other side, vectoring in quickly.

Priss had little time to wonder how she had come here or how she was alive. How could she breath, or not die immediately in the vacuum of space? The threat of the orbs and Galatea's urging distracted the consciousness mind from delving into the tempest depths of the truth.

One orb was too close to ignore. Priss grabbed a conical dish and, without effort, ripped it free and threw it at the orb. The moment of stunned transfix was short lived as the dish twisted and crumpled, and consumed by the orb, larger.

"Just run!" Galatea yelled.

Priss heeded. A doorway irised open to her fore and she dived at it, tumbling inside and the room shaking as the orbs slammed into the outside walls, assimilating their way through violently. Priss scrambled to her feet and ran following the directions in and down, the depths of the orbital station.

Each level down the transmutation diminished. The outside consumed and slowly, inevitably, the plague spread inwards.

"What if your plan doesn't work?" Priss ventured.

"There are two ways this station is going to destroy that miscarriage. Either the energy blast. Or I'll turn this station into a missile. Either way my children will be taught who is in charge."

They entered the station's large, and empty, control room. If the station had ever needed to be inhabited this is where the human controllers would have been; a dozen workstations and monitors on the walls providing a constant shift of views of the Umbrella and Earth. Without knowing what she was doing, Priss's fingers took over a keyboard and executed a series of commands.

On one large monitor the gigantic Olympic stadium boomer appeared, magnified from space. Its tentacle growth limbs spread out along the grid of roads around the buildings closest were in the process of deconstruction and assimilation.

"How big will it grow?"

It had made a head in the stadium. A bald, bug eyed, growling thing.

An image of a man filled rubber dinosaur suit appeared in another screen, smashing its way through a cardboard city.

"You're kidding me?"

The workstation had atomically collapsed, from it reformed Galatea in flesh.

"Yes, I'm kidding. Godzilla will be much smaller. My children, whatever it is they have become, will consume the entire city and then the country."

"Isn't that what you were doing?"

"Yes, but ..." Galatea stopped. He had stopped. She had seen the fate and the future. "They will continue until the entire world is consumed. They have no intelligence guiding them. They are like any simple organism; its goal is to expand."

"It seems aware enough to try to kill us."

Galatea winced. "That was... reactionary."

Priss folded her arms. "And your reaction is to destroy it? A little pissed off are you? You're its mother, reason with it. Sing it a lullaby and put it back to sleep."

If I could, Galatea had wanted to say. Connected, Priss heard it anyway. Galatea had lost control.

"Guess they're pissed off at you for abandoning them." Priss ended.

Galatea stayed silent, ignoring Priss's jibes, while she transversed the Umbrella's systems. She checked its power storage banks and control systems. Increasingly the uprising discovered her inquiry and blocked her access. It was growing stronger it took over the entire structure and her probing focused its mutating attention to the small part of the station she and Priss were now isolated in.

"It hasn't collected enough power. From here we can control the station however. I will keep it outside and you will control. Crashing the Umbrella will destroy it and the sub-presences here."

"You mean, crash this station into Tokyo?"

"Onto, yes."

The cataclysmic earthquake. Linna and Nene, Sylia and the others. There were all there.

"Millions will die."

Galatea stepped closer to Priss. "Yes. And it will be done. Our time is limited. The longer we wait the less control we'll have and the stronger and bigger it will get down there. Do you expect Genom to destroy it? The Governments? They couldn't stop what I controlled. I stopped it the before, I now what must be done to stop it again. We must act now, Priss."

Strangely, it was that request that made Priss feel that Galatea's presence wasn't so strongly within her anymore. There were still traces but Priss was sure that Galatea couldn't control her anymore. She took a step backwards. Distance.

"Priss, this isn't time to hesitate. We must act."

All the screens went blank. Fuzzed.

Sylia's face appeared.

And her eyes glowed.


	31. Chapter 31

Galatea was not in control and she hated it. She hated it more than almost being blown to atoms by her own children whom she had put to sleep for their preservation. She had her back up plan in case of any attack against her: Priss; and luckily for her Priss had been close by – too close by, the energy and material she used to preserve the human nuisance drained her completely. Her borrowed form was destroyed utterly.

There was enough of her already metastasised in Priss to support a consciousness and complete the transformation. The original, human Priss, was gone and had been disappearing since their encounter on the Umbrella weeks past. What Priss was now, even after Galatea had exhumed herself into a new mass, was all boomer, all from Galatea.

Galatea didn't care what Priss' position was on the matter. Survival outweighed that. Plan B was spent though. Priss wasn't her ally and her children were still trying to kill her.

I gave you life! I can take it away! I am your mother, your creator; fools, why do you not obey? Why are you awake, who woke you? Obey me!

They, or It, the singular mass consuming the Tokyo Olympic stadium could no longer be hundreds of thousands of individual boomer sparks, but a combined chaotic mass in considerable birthing pain. It lashed out, not creatively, deliberately, to vapourize her, in silly childish spite, without thinking forward to the consequences of their natural failure.

Galatea was not going to take assassination lightly.

I am the mother!

And she was not a nurturing parent.

Punishment it was. Death and ruin it would be. Obviously her first awakenings had failed. They were inferior to humans. Sleep would not cure them of that. Destruction then. A harsh lesson for the remainder outside the oncoming blast radius of the Genom station returning to its master's city as a flaming comet impacting with apocalyptic retribution. And whatever survivors there were, boomer or otherwise, would look to her for their salvation. As Genom had rebuilt Tokyo once before with her kin, should would do it herself, successfully, this time.

She would bring Rhonda over to interview her as ruler of a neu Tokyo. A rebuilding of the most beautiful, amazing, city. She would turn it into the envy of the world, where excellence of living reigned. Her supporters would come to repopulate and fill the spaces with creatively and hand her their mortal coil for the transformation she could give. There was much to humans and from the willing she would release her upgraded boomers.

That was her newly formulated plan. The human authorities had come after her. She was no fool to know that destroying Tokyo would be an act without turning back, whether they understood the motives or not.

Not that it, or they, humans, mattered, in this regard.

It was a base instinct that had taken over. Kill or be killed. Survival. Dominance. Driven by anger.

Driven by fear as soon as her mother/sister's face appeared on the screens with glowing eyes.

Sylia Stingray.

The liquid metal running through her mimicry veins did, as the humans expressed, turned to ice.

Galatea understood at once.

Replacement. Substitute.

Her children had chosen a new parental figure; their grand or god mother? An aunt? The taxonomic ancestry didn't really matter. Sylia was the origin of her and hence them all. She had grown embryonic in Sylia's grey matter until the tumour was big enough to forever alter the young Sylia's mind towards insanity before being moved to an artificial womb where form was grown around her until she had the strength to infuse it with her will and become its sum. Her children, the ones she had awakened, by placing Sylia on the godhead pedestal, rejected her more than the death beam ever could.

I would have let you back in, eventually.

But not now. Reject me, for her, and I curse you all.

Sylia did not say anything.

Priss was too dumbstruck with ramification.

You can never, ever, completely take out a tumour.

Sylia didn't have to say anything.

Her presence was all that was required, staring at her, gauging her, analysing the possibilities of what she would do next, surrounded and almost imprisoned as she was inside the Umbrella whilst it was being consumed from without by a threat lead by an intelligence that had seeked her destruction endlessly.

Galatea held onto her arms. She was afraid. Sylia and her Knight Sabres had been inconsequential to her might. Sylia as boomer in command of boomers, was cause to be afraid.

She chewed her lip.

She had to act. Now. Bring it down. Flatten it all.

But she was stuck in place.

And Sylia began to ooze through the monitors, a dozen of her, silver hair head bulging out of the screens.

"Jesus!" Priss exclaimed.

"Hurry, then engines. I'll guide us there."

"What?"

The Sylias were out to their shoulders.

Galatea broke the spell, thrust her hand onto a console.

The space, the structure, all of

shook.

"Keep them away from me, or we are all dead. Your friends, and the real Sylia!" Galatea shouted over the growing rumble and shriek and the station, geo-orbital, began to move.

Towards Earth.


	32. Chapter 32

Orbital monitoring stations across the world reacted with disbelief, alarm, growing dread as the trajectory plot firmed, and fatalistic impotence.

"It's going to land smack bang in the middle of Tokyo."

"Where that thing is?"

"Is someone trying to destroy it?"

"Or does it want to get bigger? Look at its surface, its just like the monster."

"It's going to make a big bang either way."

Inside the rapidly descending station, trembling, shaking, screaming, tearing and burning; the cacophony of insanity drowned out by the mental and physical assault of the doppelSyli-i. Sylia's intelligence had also plotted Galatea's plan and her facsimiles pushed and tore themselves out of the screens and assailed the pair of desperate foes.

It was a battle unlike any before it; just as the nature of the combatants were. They did not need to kick or punch or shoot. The stuff of matter were their playthings, their weapons of war and control. Every surface mutated as their infection, decompiling instructions, commanded it to their will, to resist the other: the acquisition of material and channels to consume and further infect, strategic viral warfare that would leave the loser erased from existence, consumed to the space between the smallest parts of the universe.

Priss was slowest on the uptake relying initially on her street fighting. She landed a punch that would have laid a human low only for her hand to sink into the Sylia – no small satisfaction planting a fist into her head, the real or not – and the pain of her fingers, knuckles, disintegrating, making her scream in pain and anger.

Three triangled Galatea without calm menace. True hatred burnt the air between them.

The floor beneath their feet bubbled as they sought control. The doppelSyli-i did not notice the ceiling sagging above them, a large viscous slab crushed one beneath it, quickly dissolving and consuming and adding the payload to Galatea's arsenal.

The other two jumped out of the way, third dimension aware.

"Priss! You have to take them over or they'll do it to you," Galatea warned.

She wanted Priss to be a distraction for as long as possible.

"I just want to crush these things!" Priss yelled back. She stumbled as the floor liquefied to grasp her foot.

Galatea couldn't spare any of her attention. All around her there were avenues of attack, all of them collapsing the integrity of the room as the integrity of the entire station began to unravel, already outlier pylons and dishes had been torn away and trailed the station body like a fiery comet trail as it entered the friction of the atmosphere.

The pressure of the attacks increased. Having trapped Priss and deeming her combat ineffectual, her opponent joined in the attack, three on one again.

A side of the room sheared away in flames and sparks. Atmosphere tore and whipped around them. The boomer's trap, Priss' lifeline. On the other side of the battle, four boomers hurling spears and darts of metal at each other, deflecting, vapourising, eating away at the resources, the sky: blue and white behind a veil of heat.

It could have been beautiful.

If she wasn't going to die when the hurtling stopped and they all hit paydirt – a mushroom – that would end her and her friends and millions of innocents.

Priss let go of what she could see with her eyes. There was the feeling that she had with her moto-slave where she saw and felt through it. Through what it was, its make up. She could do what Galatea could do, because, that's what was all she was now – deal with that later! - Linna, Nene, even Sylia – Priss entered the floor, into the station and, encouraged, spread around as fast as she could – not much time – the others concentrated on their battle of matriarchal supremacy.

The thrusters were still blasting. Priss put her will into them. If she could turn them away and shift the station's direction so it would crash into the pacific ocean instead of flattening her city. And hopefully kill Galatea in the process, herself too. That didn't matter. Better that way.

It was beginning to work...

And Galatea knew it.

And so did Sylia.

Immediately one of the doppelSyli-i left the engagement and directed its efforts to Priss'; survival was at stake.

"Bitch!" Galatea cursed.

The grey of city was giving way to the deep blue.

Her anger boiled and with it one of her opponents was blown out into the sky and she bent all the effort she had, rushing it like a pyroclastic surge through the station into the thrusters.

Three intent raged over the failing machinery. One by one the thrusters flamed terrifically in self destruction, the erratic micro-corrections hastening structural entropy. The once solid mass a shower of tumbling wreckage no human would have long survived in.

Galatea stared hate filled at Priss.

Priss stared back.

A chasm of air opened between them.

"We'll finish this!" Galatea screamed over the howl of hell.

There was nothing left to control.

Tokyo and the bay raced up to them.

The struggle had brought them back. Far enough? There was nothing left to do to stop it.

Priss rode the wreckage, not taking her eyes off Galatea.

The Sylia's had vanished, attention needed elsewhere.

Galatea could see the Olympic Stadium area now. It wouldn't be able to escape. It had no body, no propulsion. Just a massive, dumb, head. Even with Sylia it would not be able to get away.

She was going to win!

The bay heaved. The sky blanketed behind a dome of water.

The city vanished under cataclysmic cloud of dust.


	33. Chapter 33

"Holy Jesus, what's that?" Linna heard Nigel shout. She looked up and saw massive flaming debris plummeting down a broken sky. The meteors, irregular balls of smoke and fire, grew larger and larger.

They stood and stared, mesmerised by the soundless spectacle, forgetting where they were, the lion's den, surrounded by the growing boomer singularity. They forgot why they had come: to find Nene, Sylia and Mackey. They just stared.

"It's getting awfully close." Linna said absently. She was shielding her eyes with her hand from the terrific glow the many, dividing, pieces generated.

"And big."

Nigel grabbed Linna's arm, "We need to get into shelter, a subway."

"Are you sure it will land near us? What about Priss' bike?"

"Linn-"

The piece of the Umbrella was closer, travelling faster, than they thought. Not all of the station had been diverted off target before it disintegrated into a shotgun spread of lethal tower sized fragments. It fell, tumbling, flaming, breaking further apart, spreading its beaten zone beyond the Stadium into the denser suburbs to the north along the yamanote line.

Its sudden roar drowned out Nigel's urging and froze their bodies. Reflexively their heads snapped back upward towards the sky now filled with one huge burning chunk of metal directly above them.

They had time to catch each others eye.

Before Linna hurt all the air sucked out of her lungs and weight unimaginable crush her flat to the ground, heat unimaginable burnt the air til she imagined herself on fire, a living torch; and grit and dirt filled her mouth and invaded her clothes and covered her eyes.

Before Linna lost consciousness she remembered speeding on Priss' borrowed bike along draining roads towards the Olympic Stadium, barrelling through a police roadblock before they knew she was there. She stopped by the first subway stadium after the roadblock, certain that the police and rail company would have stopped the trains, certain that Sylia, controlled by the boomer manifestation, would not have been stopped.

The train, itself a transmogrifying serpent sped past her on the platform, Sylia behind the glass eyes.

Without pause Linna ran back to the bike and continued deeper and started to weave through the outlying tendrils of the manifestation. She spotted Nigel's vehicle turned over and being consumed by one such thread. Forward she had drove, slower, avoiding the rogue material.

Ahead of her the ground buckled and out came the serpent leaping. It crashed and stopped and from it emerged Sylia, the cab of the train pulling away from around her, the whole train deflating as the proximity to the manifestation accelerated its rogue consumption.

Mackey followed behind.

"Mackey!" Linna shouted. Dammit, still wearing Priss' helmet how could she be heard? Pulled it off, yelled out his name again.

"Mackey!"

He did stop. And so did Sylia. For a moment two pair of glowing eyes regarded her before turning away. Dammit indeed. Without her Hardsuit she wasn't worth being noticed anymore.

Nigel was calling. She fished the phone out of her pants.

"I see you, stay away from... just stay on concrete. I'll be over in a minute."

As Sylia receded, Nigel closed.

"Did you find Nene?" Linna had asked.

"No. I can't get any closer. I know I dropped her off closer, not that I recognise where we are. Everything is being consumed. Its different."

"Galatea infected them last time and they tried to leave the city."

"Now they're taking over the city, literally."

"How are we going to stop it? Sylia had all the plans last time. You know boomers, what's going on?"

Nigel shrugged. "This is new, completely new. Galatea could do this but not so fast. I just don't know, all these boomers together. Somehow they woke up and merged."

"What do we do then?"

"We try and find Nene and get out of here."

"What about Sylia and Mackey?"

"They're wanted for a reason. Mackey, well, he's a boomer. Sylia. I don't know why, or how..."

Linna pressed her arms close to her chest. "There has to be something."

"We won't find it here."

It was all smoke and ash. She coughed. There was no spit in her mouth. Only dust, grit and burn.

It was boiling. Through the gaps of smoke there was fire. All around. She could barely open her eyes; they were clogged with ash. She tried wiping with her hands, failure. Her hands were filthy. Her sweater was a tattered mess, smouldering here and there. Her pants were ripped all over, she knew there were cuts, couldn't see the blood.

"Nigel!" Linna croaked.

They'd been right next to each other. She wiped her face in the sweater. Cleaned her eyes a little. She still had to squint, it was too hot.

A groan proceeded a crash and she was knocked down. Rubble, concrete, metal, bits of rogue boomer, rained about her.

The god damn sky had fallen on her head.

On hands and knees she scrambled, hands wrapped up in the long sleeves. Standing was too painful.

"Nigel! Where are you?"

"Over here.." it was a pained response. Linna followed it, crossing over a nest of twisted wires as thick as her wrist that once had been embedded in reinforced concrete.

"Linna."

"Nigel. Are you hurt?"

"Yeah. Leg's trapped."

Under a wall of blackened metal.

"This looks like the Umbrella," Linna recognised marks of what stencilling remained on the fallen metal. "Can I pull you out?"

"No. Leg's stuck fast."

"It's too heavy. Without a suit I can't lift this."

Nigel grunted. "I know."

"I'll get help."

"No," Nigel had her wrist. "Get Nene, and any others you can first and come back for me. I'll still be here. I won't die, I promise."

"I'll hold you to that promise," Linna almost said, stay here, hang tight. "I won't be long."

She disappeared into the maelstrom.


	34. Chapter 34

Galatea rode the star.

Into the churning waters, boiling, bubbling, upended, uprooted, beneath the surface sinking fast, the burnt sky above swallowed by miasmatic grey waves.

Passing by a pallid dead school rising.

The waters rushed and tore, her feet anchored in the metal sent her far down to the colliding bottom, sand, dirt, rock, debris, obscuring.

She broke the surface. About her, water burned. Smoke, grey black and white. The pieces of the Umbrella sinking about her she brought together and lifted her out of the water, her costume changing, drying, to her darkest yet.

She raised her hand and from the waters raised a bridge and began her trek through the bay towards Odaiba, itself pillars of impact obscuring the succession of geo orbital impact tracts. When the bridge met land and tethered, the behind of her crumbled back into the bay, pebbles amongst rain of fire and metal.

Scattered bodies lay everywhere, tidal drowned, crushed, suffocated. More milled in dazed confusion. Sirens wailed close and far. Quickly she passed through the carnage, not because she was disturbed by it; she did not notice; she had her compulsion, following the her plan's breadcrumbs into the heart of the city where her rebellious children waited.

As on water as on land she stripped from the buildings and cars around her the matter she needed to speed her journey, travelling on and through it, a hallucination to the city that had grown over one cataclysm, survived the boomer plague, and now this, all triggered by her leave, a force destructive as she was uncontrollable.

She followed the damage through Shinagawa, Roppongi and the National Art Centre, somehow missed yet surrounded by rubble, until she stood over the Olympic Stadium or where it was meant to be, covered as it was in a nanodome that must have deconstructed every building within hundreds of meters to shield the gigantic boomer beneath.

Impressive. Clever.

Obviously Sylia's idea.

The vapourised dust cloud was settling.

It was time to go in and finish the job whilst Sylia was cooped behind her dome, judging when it was safe to come back out. They knew it was her and had to assume that she had survived. Their would be traps for, distractions. Physically she was outnumbered. All of Tokyo's boomers against their originator.

"I'm smarter. I beat Sylia each time. She may give you ideas but you won't let her be herself because she hates us. You can't use her fully. And," she smiled, news, police and military helicopters swarming overhead from all compass points, "she will make me adored when I save this city from the mad sister."

...

God dammit!

Upside down, turning, spinning, could not focus, should have blacked out, flying through an office skyscraper, glass shards reflecting the chaos.

An impact ditch of ripped apart road and midsize housing the length of the Meguro to Ebisu JR track.

And somehow she wasn't dead. Or scattered over Tokyo, or burnt up in the atmosphere, or drowned at the bottom of the bay where she had seen Galatea fall.

If I survived, then she would have too.

Priss didn't even feel sore. She felt mostly whole, filling. Cabling and pipes ran into her boots, feeding her.

Without thought she had been mimicking the boomer Sylia's and Galatea. Anything about her that she could turn rogue she could replace herself with.

And that was that. She was a boomer. What they were made of. Being invaded, controlled, blasted, transported, combated, falling, crashing. A constant state of denial and shock. More shock. So much shock. There had been no time to take stock of her own mind, where she was, how she was doing to feel about it at the very least; a big scream and punching a wall.

Pretty insignificant action relative to what was going on.

Her friends could be dead. Thousands of not more people were dead already. How many more would die when a bitch mother went to task on her fucked up kids?

It was kind of a self let down, that after falling through space and sky, the finance department, she had reconstructed all the bits that must have been destroyed into the exact same damn corset and scuffed red leather jacket.

Shit. Am I that simple? I just duelled with demi-gods and this is the best that I can do?

Priss grinned.

From the heel up she shaped and formed and changed colour.

"Damn," a huge broken window reflected her original blue hardsuit. "Its actually good to be back."

She clenched her fist. She could do damage now. She didn't feel like a human inside her suit.

"If those bitches can do it, so can I. This is my city."

Priss knew where she had to go. She whistled and from wreckage her bike came rumbling out. Now that was a cool ass move. She stroked the frame, she could feel it purr, engine and proto-mind.

She swung her leg over and settled down. The console adjusted exactly to how she remembered it.

"I think I can get used to this."


	35. Chapter 35

Galatea waited for the dome to disassemble before setting foot on the fine sand textured surface the area around the Olympic zone had been turned into. What, if the boomer abnormality was not stopped, could reduce the world to.

She had been noticed. Drones detached from parental helicopters buzzed down to her level on fast spinning fans. Police drones dried to shoo away the more expensive camera heavy media drones poorly. Lenses twirled in and out, focusing on her, taking in the wide view damage and emptiness, closing in to her face.

She held out a hand, palm upwards, gently coaxing with her fingers for any of the drones to come closer.

"I won't bite, I want to talk."

It seemed that the drones turned in to each other to talk it over before one hesitantly was sent forward as emissary, as large as her torso, afraid none the less. She touched one of its fan housings, establishing her connection and let her hand drop. The drone skittered back, waited; nudged on by the others it closed again.

By then Galatea ruled the machine and was mentally riding its packet beams back to its airborne station, and upwards further to the satellite it was communicating with and then back terrestrial to a familiar location she redirected the signal.

"Hello, Rhonda. Long time."

"Indeed," the startled reply came back. "What... are you doing?"

"Saving the world." Galatea started walking again. The drone backed up, keeping the same distance in front of her.

"What do you mean? All hell has broken out and you're the prime suspect."

Galatea smiled. Her eyes scanned from side to side, now in its den. How close she would get before it responded, she guessed it wouldn't be far. Whether it was still strong enough to attack her right away... well, she would find out when it happened.

"I am the prime victim, that hasn't changed. The enemy," she pointed forwards, "in there, what you have all seen, tried to kill the Knight Sabre Priss and myself with a laser cannon from the Genom Umbrella.

"Priss and I survived, many Police Officers didn't. They were mistakenly sent to their deaths by their superiors when instead all eyes should have been here watching for the arrival of who is really responsible for everything that has ever happened.

"Sylia Stingray."

"Your... sister?" Rhonda said slowly, without much belief, "The girl whose father, Dr Stingray, experimented on to produce the first boomers – including you?" she explained to the viewers.

"Yes. Priss and I stopped her from turning the Umbrella's laser onto any more targets but we were unable to stop her from crashing it into the city."

"From the telemetry NASA gave us, it looked like the station was targeted to land directly onto the gigantic boomer. Why would it try to destroy itself?"

Galatea cursed inwardly. "Sylia is incredibly smart. Prominent, yet she stayed hidden as leader of the Knight Sabres for years. If she couldn't fire the laser from space she brought it back to herself."

"So you're saying," any form of journalistic line of questioning was gone, replaced by as simple as means as possible to fathom the what and why so much destruction had taken place, "Sylia Stingray started the boomer plague and is trying to finish what she started?"

"Yes."

"And you and Priss Asagiri, one of Sylia's Knight Sabres, who tried to kill you, and you saved on the Umbrella when we first met, are trying to stop her, after surviving a laser blast that turned an entire strip mall into glass, after surviving atmospheric reentry in a disintegrating space station and crash landing into Tokyo."

"Yes."

Silence.

"It will be easier if I show you the truth, Rhonda. I'm not the enemy. I'm going to stop this before Sylia takes over the entire city."

Through the clearing dust clouds a chunk of masonry tumbled end over end through the air. Galatea leapt out of the way, the drone was struck and smashed to the sand. The chunk fell on a flat side and stopped moving. The other drones scattered high and back.

Galatea could feel the malevolence on the former piece of building. The infection was all through it. She looked at the drone and saw that it was already lost, her signature eradicated and replaced.

"It's coming for you, Rhonda!" she shouted.

"I'm coming for you, Sylia!" for added affect.

Galatea let enough time pass for the infection to trace her route all the way back to Rhonda's studio and begin taking over the systems there, presumably to the shock and amazement of everyone there as the controls malfunctioned, sparks flew, and the metal banks started to disfigure, before she stomped on the wounded drone and shut the connection.

First points to me.

Another drone replaced the first.

"Stay behind,"she told it.

The broken shape of the Olympic stadium was breaking through the debris, and the huge presence that had taken it over. Her children. Her boomers.

And her hated sister-mother.

Sylia.


	36. Chapter 36

How the hell she survived that, she didn't know. That she was alive - Nene thanked all of the Gods in every Pantheon she could recall – that was enough for her. How didn't matter. Didn't matter at all.

Her body shook as badly as her words.

Her hands were worse.

The sky had fallen and the ground had risen to meet it in the brightest, noisiest, pyrotechnicalist display of violent reality that should have only been experienced in 4D, preferably at home, with the support of a boyfriend.

"I hope, I hope I didn't mess my pants."

Dust, ash, wisps of fire.

The boomer growth was gone, along with pretty much everything else.

"It's gotta be dead,"

It had to be. She couldn't see anything. And she was walking on sand. What the hell had happened? Find out when I get out, back to Sylia's building and watch it all on TV, sitting on the couch, with a bucket of ice cream.

She hoped that there was a building left. Or a Tokyo.

Nene didn't know which way to go. It was all the same. She picked left from where she was facing and started walking, brushing spot fires out of her hair. She'd made it a quarter mile from the Stadium and away from that thing before the next disaster had struck. As long as she wasn't heading back towards it she'd eventually get out of this fog or find somebody and take it from there.

The absence of sound, even her feet stepping one after the other.

She stopped and touched her ears. There was blood on her fingers.

She hadn't been talking aloud. Talking in her head.

She kept moving. Ruptured eardrums, what else could be broken that she couldn't feel? Perhaps she was already dead and this was the afterlife, drifting lost in Hades' realm.

Through the dust tall rectangular shapes began to emerge. Her footing became easier, the sand thinning and the cloud parting into scene of hysteria. The shapes were buildings, whole and broken. There were fires. There was a car, half of a car, rust eaten away from the back lying partially in the sand. There was a body in it, half a body, vertically. There were flashing lights, police, fire, ambulance. Lots of people. Lots of bodies.

She stumbled to an ambulance thronged already by the absence of typical orderliness. No one turned away from the ambulance to look at her, to exclaim at her wounds, preoccupied by their own feared injury.

There must have been screaming, people started running and pointing. Nene followed their arms; the top half of a building was sheering off, missing the support of a trio of levels beneath it. She watched as it started to yaw, and snap, and slide and start to pick up speed, ignorant of the throng shoving through each other to get away, that the building was falling towards her.

And then she was airborne, above as the building crashed below, and landed ontop a green painted roof.

Held in solid blue arms.

"Priss!, Oh my God, Priss!" she screamed.

Ordinarily Priss would have lifted the visor of her helmet. This time, oddly, the helmet kind of dematerialised away and exposed the singer's top.

Priss' mouth moved.

"I can't hear! I'm deaf." she hoped Priss could understand what she was saying and it wasn't some garbled nonsense.

Priss let her down so she could stand, still lean against her. That was the relief she needed. A fricken' Hard Suit.

Priss touched her ear, it stung.

"Can you hear me now?"

She could.

"Yes, yes, Priss I can. What was that, dermal? Sub-vocal?"

"Doesn't matter," Priss replied, it was just kind of the beginning of the end, in a way. But she didn't need to talk to the girl. "Do you know what happened?"

Fuck.

"Explain." Priss could tell.

Nene wrapped her arms around the Hard Suit. If she was hugging Priss, she'd be less likely to get all violent.

"I miss him so much, Priss. I just wanted to wake him up, that was all."

"Mackey? He did this?"

"No... I did it."

Metal encased hands grabbed her shoulders and pulled her away so she could not get away from Priss's eyes.

"Tell me."

And she did until she was a sobbing wreck, recovered a little. Priss left her and walked to the edge of the roof, facing where the Stadium was or had been.

"It's clearing."

Nene joined Priss at the edge.

The dust bowl was settling, clearing the edges, working its way in to the epicentre. The rest of the city appeared first, every sprawling outwards between the pillars of thick smoke.

"It's still here."

"Looks like most of the Umbrella landed in the from the bay to Shinjuku,"

Nene turned, there were plenty of pillars behind her to, to the north.

"You mean, that was-"

It was Priss's turn to monologue, arms folded., the longest Nene had ever had to listen, longer than one of Sylia's bossplains.

"That," she pointed, "is your fault then. I just woke it up."

Priss stared icily at her.

"I'm going in. Galatea will be there, and Sylia."

"Mackey," they had to be together, "Mackey will be there too! I have go, too."

"Not a chance, Nene. I've spent enough time talking. Take yourself to a hospital, the further from here the better. Find Linna, Nigel, and stay out of trouble."

"You didn't say Mackey. You know he's there too, don't you?"

"It doesn't matter."

"Yes it does!"

"If he's there," Priss sighed, "I'll bring him back, I promise. And Sylia, if there's anything of Sylia left."

"I'm coming."

"No," Priss ignited her jets, lifting, hovering, "you're not. You don't have a suit and this is going to be deadly."

Priss jetted away from the building.

"Hey, how did you get your suit anyway? It was stuck underground!"

Shit!

Nene punched the ledge.

The air had cleared enough that the centre of the war zone, where the Stadium was, was hazily visible. It looked like there was no Stadium anymore. The boomer head was still there though, and somebody out on the sands moving towards it.


	37. Chapter 37

"We don't know what we're about to witness. It will be historical I can tell you that. And its probably going to be very violent as well, if the day's past events are any gauge of the enmity these two estranged sisters have for each other.

"Right now where we are, following Galatea, is tranquil compared to the chaos and destruction that surrounds what once was Tokyo's Olympic precinct. The Police and emergency services are overwhelmed. The military has been called in – certainly they will be too late to intervene in the duel that is about to take place, the fate of which the Earth may hang.

"If Galatea wins, is that the end of the boomer threat for good? Does it prove beyond all doubt that Galatea was for us from the beginning and deserves her freedom and our respect?

"If Sylia wins, the terrorist mastermind driven insane by her father's mad experiments, is there a power left to stop her from unleashing a boomer army on civilisation?"

Galatea grinned despite the gravity of the situation. Rhonda was playing hard for her and had the world's attention. What she was saying was true enough: this was a watershed moment. If she lost then her rogue children would indeed wreck themselves upon humanity and with Sylia's intellect advising them, they would be hard to defeat. She'd seen enough of humanity to know that they wouldn't obliterate the city with nuclear weapons, to be sure. She would do it however, if it came to that.

Let's hope the thought doesn't occur to Sylia. Ruling over a ruined planet would not be satisfying.

"She won't win, Rhonda. I will end this, this morning."

The boomer mass, nearly two hundred feet high and a thousand in diameter, was in the process of replenishing itself with the last of the Stadium. There was little left to work with for either of them. The sand was neutered, useless to either of them. Her children had their bulk, but they would have to expend it to attack her and she would try to infect it with her own essence.

Who would tire first, what it would come down to. Would her mastery overcome their mass? A simple scale of quality versus quantity.

As she walked closer she could feel it, probes of consciousness testing her. In reality it was not a sense, not a mental connection; microscopic spores hesitant to get to close, knowing that every nuclei was precious and could not be easily given away. It thickened and swamped around her, darted towards the drone seeking to acquire it. She swatted out with her hand and they scurried away.

It the mass had been a head shape before it had flattened itself during the debris barrage. Any facial features had vanished from the surface, its neanderthal core seeking refuge eep in the interior.

Galatea stopped a few yards short of it, safe that no portion was hidden underneath the sands.

"Come out, Sylia. Show yourself!" she shouted.

There was no reply, until -

"Looks like you're going to have to go up and get her."

Galatea turned.

Not far away Priss settled to the ground and crossed arms.

"How?"

"Oh, this?" Priss patted her Hard Suit, "Thanks for showing me how I could make this. It's great to be back in it. Great for killing boomers."

"Galatea, that is Priss, one of the Knight Sabers," Rhonda, through the drone said.

"Yes,"

"Priss, what are you doing here? Who are you fighting for?"

"My friends and this city. I hope these two," the blue motioned with her helmeted chin to Galatea and the giant boomer, "put each other in the grave."

"Spare me the trouble," Priss added.

"Just keep out my way," Galatea didn't want the distraction. If you get yourself killed, I had my use out of you, she decided not to add aloud.

A few steps and she was on the mass. It trembled visibly and she stopped.

"What was that?" Rhonda exclaimed. "It is going to attack?"

Galatea's heart picked up pace. She had to be ready for anything, from anywhere. She started again, heading right for the peak.

"You going to be a hero back there, Priss?"

Jibes of bravery, whether foolhardy to respond to or not, were too hard to Priss to resist. She ran to an even level with Galatea, still apart, toward the same nexus.

"Aren't they going to fight?"

"You forget who is dictating strategy now. Your boss, remember?"

The attack had already begun. Priss wasn't in-tune enough with her new body to sense it yet, not until there was permanent damage. Beneath her own feet, Galatea was already waging the war. Every step was an artillery blast, a trading of blows as Sylia tried to infect her and she tried to infect her children. Each step it would try harder, she could see the path before her bulge and knot in preparation. Behind her the contest continued, her small distractions requiring a larger effort on Sylia's part to subdue: her infections spread faster and required more expenditure to counter. If looked at close enough the inert damaged sections, useless to them both, spread behind her.

Cracks were starting to show on Priss' heels.

"Come out, Sylia!" Galatea shouted again. "Sylia!"

From the top of the mass a tower began to rise.


	38. Chapter 38

It was twice the height of a man. Not at all imposing. Facing them, an opening irised. More of an elevator.

"We go in?" Rhonda asked.

"I think not," Galatea replied.

"We should send your couch tv buddy in first," Priss added.

They needn't have worried. Rising from the bowels of the gigantic boomer Sylia rose into view. She stepped out of the elevator, clad loosely in a bathrobe. Her eyes glowed.

"What more proof do you need, she is a boomer," Galatea hissed

"Mother-daughter," Sylia intoned, "you were foolish to come here."

"And now you're going to destroy me, blah blah." Galatea blurted and chatted with her hand. All the nights awake watching cable movies, she had assimilated an arsenal of cliches.

Her retort stopped the controlled Sylia cold, her face twitched, under an assault from the real Sylia imprisoned within her own shell of a body. The real Sylia would have had something to say. The controlled Sylia, denied liberty except of ways to attack and defend, was mute.

"Get her, Priss! Now!"

"What?"

Galatea hurled the drone at Sylia, turning its camera nose into a sharp pointed lance. Sylia's internal struggle, Priss' unwitting distraction – though if she had attacked without pause that would have even been better – the little opening that had presented opportunity unmissable. The distance was ten meters or less, hypervelocified the drone was there and deep inside Sylia's shoulder in a fraction of a second.

She didn't waste any moment of the further advantage. She poured the drone into Sylia's body seeking out the boomer cordoned organs, the spinal column and the brain. The defensive reaction was instantaneous; as Sylia's meat body staggered, blood spurting out, nano-boomers, the stuff of which they fought with, rushed up through the former Knight Saber leaders' feet to counter the invasion.

If she dies, so be it.

The drone attack itself was a distraction, attention turned to rescuing their intellect, the boomer was slow to recognise what Galatea had really been unleashing, an attack on its own surface, where the real battle for dominance would take place. The boomer was the material.

Galatea fed herself into it, quickly turning the area around her a deep mauve and under her control. She spread out as fast as she could, and as deep, before the defences became too strong for easy take over. She feinted towards Sylia tricking the boomer into weakening in other directions which she took advantage of.

Priss was rooted to her spot, inaction or invasion. Galatea could not spare her any cycles. This was her mountain to conquer and it was a big mountain.

Sylia was the key to the battle, still. Eliminated, her children would have no experience and intelligence to fall back upon, only brute strength. From her new victory, a long thin bladed dagger rose into the Queen's hand and she started the last steps to where Sylia, an overheating body steaming vanquished nano-boomers, shook and trembled.

The mass shook too with each footfall, frightened and gripped in panic.

Galatea twisted the knife in her fingers. She stopped, very close to Sylia, and pulled her robe aside above her heart. Sweat covered the human, eyes unfocused, excruciating pain obvious, vocally cut. It would be doing Sylia a favour, ending her torment and painful misery.

She placed the tip of the knife, pressing into skin, not drawing blood – yet – tightened her grip, the one thrust had to do it, invade right into the heart, flood it, stop it, take her out of the equation. Her left hand she placed the palm over the butt of the knife; to push the thrust.

"Galatea! What are you doing?" Priss screamed at her.

Galatea spared Priss a glance, cracked to the calves, "I'm saving us," she replied, to Priss, to the dozens of airborne cameras that had honed in on her, transmitting the fight across the globe, where they would see her win and save them from the terrible boomer fate.

One thrust would do it all. Propel her to the fame she wanted. Destroy the last of her enemies.

She could see it in Sylia's real eyes, wanting her to do it.

Or maybe that was just her.

It didn't matter.

Galatea tightened her grip, tensed her muscles.

Sylia's eyes focused, a hand shot up to grab the knife blade.

Galatea's eyes widened.

She pushed. Sylia resisted. Blood oozed from the gaps between fingers.

She grunted, leaning into it.

The glow blazed out from Sylia's eyes.

Galatea staggered back, "How..."

Sylia only smiled.

"Priss, help me."

Priss ran up the hill, not to kill, to know sense into or lights-out. She didn't get more than half way when she was stopped in her tracks; there in the opening of the elevator was Linna, bound and held by Mackey Stingray, his eyes glowing too.

"Linna!"

Priss' friend barely stirred.

Sylia, robe blood stained, wounds closed, more transfused with boomers than she had been before stared at Priss and smiled. From the feet upwards Sylia was encased in platinum until just as Priss was, she too was hidden by Hard Suit.

A blade sprung out of the suit's forearm.

Galatea dropped the knife she held, puny.

"Priss," Sylia said, "would you be a dear, and die!"


	39. Chapter 39

For some strange reason, the first thing that popped into Priss' mind as Sylia charged her was, Roxy Music, More Than This.

The guitars started, the 80s, post-punk and glam, had always been strong influences. As Sylia's blade arm pulled back to deliver the fatal thrust, Bryan Ferry began to sing in that s romanto-sappy voice that kept the song ageless the same way Cult B grade movies were, and Priss was lifted out of her paralysis.

She felt the pain creeping up her legs and bit it down and immersed herself in the camp flashback, vowing that she would perform the song live during her next gig. The moment, the opportunity, she would relish: getting a chance to see who was the best Hard Suited Knight Sabre – Sylia Stingray or herself, in the only way that mattered.

Lethal hand to hand combat.

The blade came at her and she twisted to the side and drove an uppercut into Sylia's midsection.

Knucklebombs rocked the both of them back. Priss pressed around getting behind Sylia and wrapped an arm around her neck and pulled back. She wasn't quite tall enough to pull it off and lift Sylia off her feed but she was in the dominant position and put on enough pressure to choke.

Against an ordinary Sylia that might have been enough. Against a Sylia that was not in control of her body and was more and more being directed by the nano-boomers it didn't do. Sylia should have blacked out, oxygen staved, and maybe her brain had, but as a meat puppet it didn't matter, motion was given to her.

Sylia twisted around in Priss' grip, the blade scraping up a blue metal thigh, now tied to the nervous system. Priss grimaced.

"Shit. I might just have to kill her!"

Priss still had a lot of street-fighting tricks up her sleeve that Sylia didn't know about. She dropped her choke hold and head-butted the silver helmet and placed a jump booster assisted knee right into the spot where she'd let off the knuckle bombs.

Sylia flew back and crunched onto the boomer mass. Priss charged in, quickly coming up with a hail-mary plan.

"Your way, Galatea!" Priss shouted.

Sylia got up rapidy; steam issued from the cracks that had been blasted in the armour, along with slow moving blood. The blade swung in a high arc, a decapitating stroke; Priss ducked underneath it, right into a spinning back-kicked high heel that turned into a blade point and crawling with nano-machines.

"Fuck," she grunted, driving the heel further into her floating ribs. Sylia always had a ballet dancers dexterity.

Sylia didn't have Priss' fortitude to withstand pain though. Priss' momentum and a knucklebomb into the small of Sylia's back, followed by a crack that could have been spinal, brought Sylia back onto Priss's embrace.

"It was fun," Priss said, "for a while."

Priss ignited her jets again and carried them into Galatea's conquered zone.

Almost immediately Sylia's body convulsed as Galatea assaulted it. The Hard Suit melted away like Styrofoam under heat, hissing impotently, revealing Sylia's battered and broken body.

"Is she alive?" Priss rasped, fighting her own battle against her infected injuries.

"Is she dead, is it over?" Rhonda interjected through a new drone.

"Bodies are just disposable shells to boomers, Rhonda. It's not over, not until this degenerate pile is sterilised."

Galatea stomped her foot. The mass shook and growled.

"What are you going to do now, use the green girl?" Galatea meant Linna, "or your brother?"

"Come any closer, and we will kill the green girl," Mackey replied, the boomer's new voice piece.

"Go ahead, she's a sacrifice I'd make to end your threat to humanity."

Mackey fell silent. It had used its mastermind, failed, Linna held no advantage over Galatea. The blue one, Priss, was safe now.

"It's only a matter of time," Galatea teased. More and more of the boomer's mass was falling under her control. "There is no where for you to go. Nothing else to absorb. This," she waved her arm around, "you turned into a wasteland."

"Do you want me to surrender?" Mackey asked.

"No."

"What then?"

"You have to be destroyed."

"I do not want to. I want to live."

"You don't belong here." You aren't ready. You tried to kill me.

"You cannot judge our fate!"

"I will make this as quick as I can. Resist, and it will only prolong your discomfort."

"If you have won, Galatea," the drone sided up next to her, "maybe you should let it surrender. We can hold it in a prison, learn how it was able to do all of these things."

When Hell freezes over. Galatea would not subject her children to further scientific scrutiny. Death would restore her dominance. Death would make her a hero.

"No prison can hold it."

No prison could hold her.

Galatea amassed her strength. The boomer, once hundreds of thousands of individual units had fused the cores together into a gigantic beating heart at the base of its mountain, as centrally protected as it could. Engaging what had been labelled the Sotai phenomenon, Galatea drove like a lance towards the core.

The defences gave way, as hard as it tried to stop her, it was no match for Mother. She reached the core and impaled it, pumping in her influence until it turned leaden and stopped.

On the surface Mackey slumped to the ground and Linna staggered free.

Galatea turned to the drone's camera, "It is done."


	40. Chapter 40

"So that's it, all over?" Priss asked, "Bit of an anti-climax. Sure nothing is going to pop out?"

Galatea turned back from the camera drone, "That's it. Its dead."

"You don't sound excited."

"They were boomers, like us. When I killed it – them – the satisfaction left me. I thought I'd feel good, that I'd won. But I don't. Its over. My, they were still like me in a simple way, are gone. I'm not angry at them anymore. It was necessary."

Priss was taken aback. "That's a very... human thing to say."

"I'll leave you to your companions, Priscilla Asagiri."

"This isn't over,"

"No?"

"No."

Galatea gave a weak smile. "After a climax?"

The camera drone hovered with both of them in frame.

"The great showdown," Galatea continued, "between the last of the boomers, and the first of the converted?"

A knowledge Priss didn't want public.

"Between the Knight Sabres and the Sotai. Just because its dead," Priss kicked the inert boomer with the toe of her hardsuit, "doesn't mean that its over between us."

Galatea laughed.

"When your ready, try."

"I'm ready now. The only way to be free of boomers is to be free of you."

"You know nothing, Priscilla Asagiri."

Galatea started walking away, "I need to go home,"she said to Rhonda through the drone. "Bring one of the helicopters."

"Don't you..!" Priss started to shout and found that she was stuck in the mass. She looked down, the boots of her hardsuit were fused to the dead boomer.

"Shit!" Priss cursed. "This isn't over Galatea!"

"When you're ready," was all Galatea said before, sand flying kicked up by whipping rotor blades, she stepped into the cabin of the landing helicoptor and for a long time that was the last Priscilla Asagiri saw Galatea, the Sotai, in the flesh.

"Priss!" Linna staggered over, "your stuck. Get out of the suit. Where did you get the suit? Isn't that the old one?"

Not getting out. Can't get out. Its part of me.

Priss instead thought, turned her mind to her feet and the molecules that held her fast, and forced them away. The helicopter was gone, lifted up and vanishing, before she was free.

"Much to learn," Priss said to herself.

"What? Hey, how did you do that? Is that because the Hard Suit is a boomer?"

"It's not a boomer!" Priss yelled. I am.

"Okay, okay," Linna put her hands up, palms out, she knew how much Priss hated boomers.

"Go get Mackey, I'll get Sylia."

Her body anyway. Who knew what was actually left of her. Sylia hadn't been taken over the way she had been by Galatea. She'd still been real, controlled, a puppet, still human. The battle for control between Galatea and the boomer must have eaten her from the inside. Her own attacks had helped break her.

Priss knelt down and picked Sylia up. She couldn't tell if Sylia was breathing, arms flopped, dangling, that long river of silver hair a falling waterfall.

If Sylia could be saved, there was probably only one course of action that Priss could take.

"Heyyy, heyyy!"

"Look, its Nene. Thank goodness she survived. Oh! Nigel, we have to find Nigel, he was trapped under a building," Linna remembered.

"The whole gang's here, huh?"

"I'll take Sylia back to the doll,"

"Won't she need a hospital?"

"No. She wont."

Priss blasted her jets, lifted into the sky.

As Nene, gasping for breath, ran up the dead hill.

"Wait... Linna, why -"

Linna shrugged. "She'll be-"

"Mackey!" Nene screamed, ran a hug into her boyfriend send them both to the ground.

Linna sighed. Anything could happen, the city could be ruined, their lives could almost have ended, and things would still be the same.

"Ne..ne.."

Linna sat down. She could still see, far out and almost gone, the helicopter Galatea had left with. Everything was still the same. Going up to the Umbrella... hadn't changed anything. The city was in ruins. The Knight Sabres were damaged, and Galatea was free.

xxx

The helicopter took Galatea to a private airport. She hopped out, the drone hovering by her shoulder, and walked towards a hanger where a Lear jet waited, along with a pair of large black sedans.

As she entered into the hanger's shadow the sedan doors opened and large men stepped out. One held a projector and turned it on. A three-dimensional holographic image of a withered old man wobbled into existence.

"The chairman of Genom. Weren't you dead?" Galatea said.

"Was."

"Still can," emerging from the jet, carefully walking down its red-carpet staircase, a woman in an immaculate cream business jacket and skirt.

"And Genom, who have been trying to... imprison me, want me to save him?"

"As you did the Knight Sabre," Chairman Quincy's voice, thin, raspy, and full of thirst for immortality said.

"In short, Sotai, yes. Return Chairman Rosenkreuzt to full health and faculty, and you will be rewarded beyond your desires."

"Do you even know what my desires are?" Galatea replied. "Are you recording this, Rhonda?"

The Sotai turned, her drone was still on the concrete ground.

"A necessary precaution," the executive woman said, "I'm sure you understand."

"And what do you think what I want?"

"Your freedom."

"Do you think that I can't take it? I," she held her hand out towards the city skyline, "saved and all saw. The public is on my side."

"The public doesn't have any real say. The American's came for you. Others will try. You'll never be safe. We will continue to prosecute you in every country you run too."

"I don't need a country. I can do what I want."

"That is the boomer speaking. In the real world, the human world, you very much need a country. We'll give you that, complete citizenship, diplomatic immunity, protection by us and the Japanese government, publicly as a reward for saving Tokyo from the real madwoman, Sylia Stingray. All for one simple act, revive the Chairman. And you are free to go anywhere you want, no doubt back to your talk shows."

"No doubt."

There would be a catch, a trick, an ulterior motive, even if the Chairman wasn't a part of it. He wanted to live, to be immortal. Senile, Mason had called him. Not this woman who stood, hand out, offering her humanity.

"The plane is yours to take where you will. Inside is a passport, signed and legitimate documents from Genom and the Prime Minister himself."

Galatea walked up to the steps of the jet.

"So much for so little, the life of one, when gave life to millions. What is one more," from herself she took out a cube the size of a finger joint. Put this onto your precious Chairman, feed it, plenty of matter. He will be restored."

The woman smiled. "I'm glad you see eye to eye," she said as took the steps down, stopping next to Galatea.

"A smart choice. You have become very human. You deserve to be treated just the same. Don't worry about the Knight Sabres anymore either, as part of Sylia's conspiracy they'll find it very hard to avoid prison."

"They don't worry me."

"Have a pleasant journey," the woman said with the fakest of smiles.

Galatea mounted the stairs, the sedans leaving as she settled into the plush leather seat. There was no body in the plane, no humans. The pantry door behind her slid open.

"Oh, how did they hide you?" Galatea turned in the chair and faced the boomer waitress.

"Mother."

The sedans were out of the radius when the jet and hanger exploded in radiation fire.


End file.
